Produced by Robert Jennings, 29 Whiting Rd., Oxford, MA 01540-2035, Email [email protected]

Produced by Robert Jennings, 29 Whiting Rd., Oxford, MA 01540-2035, Email Fabficbks@Aol.Com

------FADEAWAY #46 is a fanzine devoted to science fiction and related fields of interest, and is produced by Robert Jennings, 29 Whiting Rd., Oxford, MA 01540-2035, email [email protected]. Copies are available for a letter of comment, or a print fanzine in trade, or by subscription at a cost of $20.00 for six issues. Letters of comment are much preferred. Any person who has not previously received a copy of this fanzine may receive a sample copy of the current issue for free by sending me your name and address. Publication is bi-monthly. This is the August-September 2015 issue ______

THE SHADOW OF ADDICTION For over a year now my most consistent reading has been the series of trade paperback books Sanctum Books is producing that reprint the original Shadow pulp magazine stories, two novels per volume. These trade paperbacks come out once a month and approximate the publishing schedule of the original Shadow magazine, which at the height of its popularity in the 1930s was appearing twice a month. The history of the Shadow character is relatively well known, altho exact details of his earliest origins are elusive and contentious. In the summer of 1930 Street & Smith, publishers of many kinds of fiction magazines, decided to take advantage of a seasonal drop in radio rates to sponsor an hour-long program to boost the sales of their premier mystery magazine, Detective Story Magazine. According to most sources the account was given to the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency to work up a program adapting actual stories from the magazine. Detective Story Magazine was a pulp sized mag, the oldest and earliest American magazine devoted entirely to the detective story and mystery genre. Started in 1915, the title had taken over from the Nick Carter Weekly a nickel weekly which has been running since 1891. The advent of the pulp magazines had spelled the end of the dime and nickel novels, so it was a relatively smooth transition, with new Nick Carter stories, both novel length and short stories, appearing in the page of the new title. The magazine was initially produced twice a month, but with the first week of 1918 it switched to a weekly publishing schedule, and sales boomed. During the 1920s it was one the most popular fiction magazine on the stands, but the Depression, which was beginning to make its full effect felt in 1930 had cut the circulation considerably. The powers at Street & Smith felt that a radio program dramatizing some of the stories from the current issues of the mag would reach new readers and boost circulation. The ad agency decided that they needed something distinctive to set the series apart from other radio programs, and that the ‘something’ should be a unique character who introduced the series. Initially ideas ranged from having a fictional police official or detective act as the announcer, but they finally decided on someone more sinister, a character to be called The Shadow. This Shadow character with a deep somewhat ominous inflection to his voice would introduce the stories and provide short epilogs after each adventure. Initially James LaCurto did the voice, but very soon Frank Readick took over the job. S&S expected a sales boost for their magazine, but the listeners were more fascinated with the creepy Shadow character than the actual detective stories themselves. Newsstands reported customers were asking for the magazine that featured that Shadow character they had heard over the radio, instead of Detective Story Magazine. Quick to see a marketing possibility, the powers at S&S decided to create a single character pulp devoted to the Shadow character. Most of the senior staff were veterans of the old dime novel days and had long believed that a pulp devoted to a single, interesting character could carry a ten cent pulp title. Circulation director Henry William Ralston usually gets the credit for rounding out and developing the idea. He hired a young author named Walter Gibson to write the series. Gibson was noted for being an adapt amateur magician and a very fast writer who turned out news features, true crime exposes, detective stories, had several syndicated newspaper columns including a weekly feature on magic tricks anyone could learn, and who was amendable to working closely with the editors at S&S clearing story plots down to the chapter level with the editors before he launched each new story. Each story used the pen name of ‘Maxwell Grant’, and each adventure claimed to have been taken from the actual crime files of The Shadow himself, as told to Maxwell Grant. Originally the magazine was planned as a quarterly, with the lead character being a sinister anti-hero who wore the kind of black cape and slouch hat favored by the villains in the old stage melodramas. He would work at night, he was armed with two automatics, he would terrorize the world of crime, take vengeance when needed, shooting to kill rather than capture, and he would use magic tricks to confuse and confound the denizens

2 of the underworld. He was, in short, exactly the kind of free-wheeling, outside the law vigilante that the average citizen living thru the Lawless Thirties had been waiting for. The first issue of The Shadow magazine was launched as a pulp dated April 1931, but on the news stands at least a month earlier. Considering that the S&S Detective Story Magazine radio show had debuted the previous summer, this was a lightning fast reaction time, possibly aided by the fact that S&S owned their own printing presses, which were housed right in the same building as their editorial offices. The magazine’s sales were impressive. Rumor has it that S&S went back and reprinted that first issue, but this has never been verified. By the third issue, dated October 1931 the title had become a monthly. In October 1932 the magazine became a bi-weekly. There were concerns that Walter Gibson could not keep up the pace of the writing, so a second writer, Theodore Tinsley was engaged, over Gibson’s objections, to turn out four novels a year as back-up, just in case Gibson got sick, or developed writers’ block. That never happened, but Tinsley, who tried to create stories as closely mimicking Gibson’s current production as possible, continued to turn our four stories a year thru the early 1940s. In all 325 Shadow stories were written, most turned out by Gibson. In the mid 1940s Gibson and Street & Smith had a major falling out. Gibson had initially not even been paid the standard S&S magazine rate of a penny a word for his Shadow stories. His contract had been renegotiated several times, but over time major changes had taken place at S&S, including mass firings and forced retirements of many of the old editors, including two executive shakeups, all following the death of Ormand Smith in 1933. By the early 1940s comic books were cutting deeply into the sales of many pulp magazines. S&S had been slow to get into the comic business because their printing presses could not produce the full color interior pages needed. The idea of out-sourcing the printing to another company had never occurred to the executives of the company, but after another shake-up in the late 1930s, Allan Grammer was the new company president, and the one of the first things he did was to sign a contract with a major web offset printer to start printing a new line of S&S comic books, of which The Shadow Comics was the very first title issued. Grammer also began to emphasize the women’s magazine titles the company was producing. Sales of the women’s slick paper mags were going up, so new titles aimed at female readers were added, even as sales on many of the traditional pulps were going down. After the Shadow comic book was launched, its sales rocketed up to over half a million copies an issue, while sales of the Shadow pulp magazine shrank slowly until it was bobbing around a hundred thousand to a hundred fifty thousand copies per issue. With the April 1943 issue the Shadow pulp slipped back to monthly publication. The argument over Gibson’s new contract stalled. Gibson had been writing other stories for S&S, including most of the Shadow comic, all of the Magic Detective comic, radio scripts for many programs, especially Nick Carter and Chick Carter, doing the Shadow comic strip, produced his own magazine devoted to the magician’s arena, maintained a syndicated newspaper column, and was doing all the promotion and publicity for Blackstone the Magician whose stage show was touring the country constantly. This, all in addition to writing the Shadow magazine novels. He felt he should be getting more money. S&S felt he should be getting the same, or better yet, less, because sales of the mag were in slow decline. Gibson decided to sue the publisher, claiming he was the individual who had actually created the Shadow character and that he had been responsible for its popularity with the public, including its spin-offs, the Shadow radio character program which began in 1937, the comic book, the short lived newspaper comic strip,

3 and the five feature movies that had been (theoretically anyway) based on the Shadow character. This litigation drug on for awhile, but Gibson lost handily, and got whacked for legal fees at the same time. As a sign of the changing time, the magazine had switched to digest size with the December 1943 issue, and raised the cover price to fifteen cents. Long time editor John L. Nanovic was out. The new editor came on board, and after Gibson launched his law suit, Bruce Elliott, a young up and coming detective story writer was tapped to write the monthly novel, now reduced to about thirty thousand words, and often far less. The editorship changed several times in the following few years. Mr. Elliott followed the directions of the new editors, who wanted sophistication and stories in the style of the mystery movies that were popular in those days, so he turned out stories in which Lamont Cranston was the hero, the Shadow seldom appeared, the police were incompetent dopes, humor was allegedly added, and the stories were complicated puzzles. Readership declined at a more rapid rate than before. In 1947 the Shadow digest magazine slipped to a bi-monthly schedule. In late 1948 S&S decided to give the world of pulp magazines another try. The Shadow was one of the titles that returned to full pulp size, with a full length Shadow novel, and Walter Gibson was signed back on as the writer. The schedule was tentatively slated as quarterly. Gibson, after his long enforced absence, turned out an excellent first class thriller for his return, and the cover for that Fall 1948 issue is distinctive, one of the best covers in the traditional Shadow style. Unfortunately that was the last good story Gibson produced. There were three more pulp sized Shadow issues, but the title was cancelled in the summer of 1949, along with the other S&S pulp sized magazines. Some of those magazines were subsequently sold to Popular Publications, but S&S retained the rights to The Shadow, which was still running as a popular Mutual radio program, and which had also been adapted by Columbia as a serial in 1940. Columbia still had an option on turning out a second Shadow serial, altho the sequel never materialized. Most people are familiar with the Shadow character from the long running radio series. In 1937 S&S made a deal with the Blue Coal company to produce a series of adventures starring the Shadow character beginning in September of 1937. Fall and early winter were the peak periods for selling coal, when homeowners needed to restock their supply in preparation for the coming winter season. The series starred a young Orsen Welles, and initially featured radio adaptations of some of the Shadow pulp magazine stories. Walter Gibson was story consultant on the series and wrote some of the scripts. Cramming a sixty or seventy thousand word story into a half hour radio adventure proved to be nearly impossible, so some of the magazine plot themes were used and changed to fit the new format, In the radio series Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town, had the power to magically cloud men’s minds so they could not see him. He was assisted by his ‘friend and constant companion’ Margo Lane. Margo Lane was not a character in the pulp magazine stories, but the radio dramas needed someone for the lead character to talk to, to explore the possibilities of the plot, and Margo Lane was both the sounding board, and as the series progressed, increasingly the Damsel In Distress, who was menaced by the fiend/monster/criminal of the week and had to be rescued at the last possible moment by the Shadow.

4 Under pressure Gibson introduced Margo Lane into the Shadow novels beginning in the early 1940s. He didn’t like the idea, and initially made Ms Lane incompetent and apt to get into troubles of her own making. Most of the magazines readers were not enthusiastic about the character’s intrusion into the series either. In the pulp magazine stories The Shadow had adopted the identity of New Jersey multi-millionaire Lamont Cranston, with the approval of the real Lamont Cranston who was an international traveler, big game hunter and adventurer who roamed the world and seldom came back to the States, trusting The Shadow to manage his financial affairs for him. In the August 1937 issue Gibson decided that he didn’t like the idea of The Shadow being Lamont Cranston, so he created a brand new identity for his hero. The Shadow was, he said, actually Kent Allard, a flying ace during the Great War, an explorer, a man of the world, who had returned to New York after a fifteen year absence during which he claimed to have been marooned in the jungle of South America cared for by a lost tribe of Indians. Actually Allard had faked his death and had been in New York all along as The Shadow, borrowing the identity of Lamont Cranston and sometimes appearing as businessman Henry Arnaud, among other identities. Gibson promoted this idea constantly but it never sat well with most of the readers, and the Kent Allard identity was used more and more infrequently until it finally pretty much disappeared completely right before Gibson and S&S had their falling out. In the pulp magazine series The Shadow is assisted by a cadre of agents, generally seven in number, who usually communicate with their leader by telephone thru his contact man Burbank. Burbank relays information back and forth between them and The Shadow. The Shadow and his assistants could have used a few of Dick Tracy’s portable wrist radios, but in the days before that invention was introduced the world was filled with plenty of pay telephones. Today, mobile cell phones have completely eliminated pay telephones. The Shadow’s group of agents included two who worked within the underworld, a financial wizard, a reporter, and a cab driver who piloted the Shadow’s own personal cab. His number one agent was Harry Vincent, a likable young man with a charismatic personality, able to blend in almost anywhere, who could be counted on to make friends with important people, both suspects and potential victims alike, and ferret out information The Shadow needed to solve the complex cases that attracted his attention. The Shadow was nominally concerned with street crime and the kind of organized crime that filled the pages of the daily newspapers. But actually he was concerned with cases the police could not easily solve, cases that sometimes the police did not even know existed as criminal schemes at all. He faced off against master minds of crime, people who wove webs of deceit and subterfuge, sinister forces that laid out complicated plots of evil working toward ultimate goals of vast wealth that were often not obvious to the police, the public, or sometimes not even the victims of these grand schemes. These were super criminals, super fiends, and the Shadow was adapt at unearthing their plans and working to defeat them. The plots were complicated, murder was often part of the details, and often the Shadow was faced with death, defeat, and numerous setbacks before he was able to break the case, learn who the real criminal behind the menace was, and foil the scheme. Plots of most of these stories are well thot out, and well developed. The earlier stories, from 1931 thru 1939 are the very best ones. In these adventures the plots and the action are carefully laid out with plenty of conversation and dialog between characters, and the

5 ultimate bad guys are unknown to the readers as well as The Shadow. Many stories after 1939 display some problems. This is not to say that there weren’t plenty of excellent adventures coming out after that date, but the editors seemed to have decided that the Shadow needed to show more action in his stories, so there are a lot more running gun battles, hectic car chases, death traps, and attempted gangland ambushes where the body count, particularly of mobsters, mounts dramatically as the story progresses. At some point either Gibson or the editor noticed that, so the Shadow, previously described as a dead shot with those automatics, even at a distance, took to nicking, or wounding many of his foes instead of shooting them dead on the spot. This apparently pleased somebody, probably the bad guys, but they never learned their lesson. They kept coming back to face the guns and wits of The Shadow until their final defeat in the closing pages of the adventures. The main problem with the stories after 1939, a problem that becomes progressively worse as the series went into the 1940s, is that Gibson lost the ability to allow his characters to converse with each other. Instead of writing a story in which characters speak to one another as events occur and the characters react to those events, so that they and the readers experience the adventure as it actually unfolds, he is instead deliberately telling a story, writing down to the reader in the style of an author of books for very small children. Sure, the writing is sophisticated, but the tone is that of a person who is telling an abbreviated tale, someone who cannot be bothered with too many details, including conversation between the characters in the story. Even the action becomes condensed as Gibson tells what is happening, as tho delivering a report, instead of writing the action sequences as they unfold as part of an ongoing adventure that the reader can appreciate as it happens. This is a major flaw, in my opinion, and by the early 1940s, most of the stories, particularly the ones involving Margo Lane, were engulfed in this style of writing. It was as tho Gibson was too busy with his other projects to worry much about the Shadow novels any more. I’m sure he didn’t have that feeling; but the hurried abbreviated style of telling an abbreviated story sans too much detail, with convoluted action sequences crammed in as padding makes some of those stories absolutely unreadable, at least for me. Luckily Anthony Tollin, the owner and head editor of Sanctum Books, instinctively realizes these problems. Thus far he has generally been able to balance out each trade paperback in the series with a story from the pre-1939 period, and a novel from the post 1939 period, so you generally get one really excellent story, and another one that might be good, or, perhaps not so hot at all. Along the way almost all the vastly inferior Bruce Elliott stories have also been reprinted as part of the ongoing series. In those months there were three Shadow stories per book. The decline in writing on this series did not happen all at once, and it was certainly not consistent. For example, the most recent Sanctum trade paperback, #97 contains two Shadow novels, one from 1940 titled “Crime At Seven Oaks” and the other one from 1942, titled “The Northdale Mystery”. Both of these stories are excellent, with double and triple plot shifts, interesting characters, involved criminal plots, sinister foes opposing the efforts of The Shadow to unravel the mysteries, and good fast paced writing. But, then there are other stories, such as the lead feature in volume #77 from 1941 titled “The Temple of Crime” that are prime examples of a style of condescending clunky writing with meandering action, inert characters, including lots of back-peddling to make actions fit a convoluted plot that I find difficult, and sometimes impossible to plow thru. There are a few other things I find irritating about The Shadow. One of the original characteristics that distinguished The Shadow on radio was his sinister laugh. It was carried over to the regular weekly radio series from 1937 onward, and became part of the pulp magazine series very early. On radio it was used sparingly and with great

6 emotional impact, both on the bad guys in the stories, and on the listeners as they heard the laugh at the beginning and end of the each program. Initially Gibson also used the sinister laugh sparingly, but that soon changed. As time went on the Shadow used his ‘sardonic’, “mirthless, sinister laugh” much more frequently. In fact, it became his signature. Police cars and ambulances announce their presence with a wailing siren. The Shadow announced his arrival on the scene with his signature laugh, which we are told, stuck fear and consternation into any members of the criminal class who encountered it. The laugh became more than a signature, it became an epidemic. Story after story we read about the exploits of what any normal person would conclude is some kind of black clad maniac swishing around in flowing silken cloak and robes, cackling like a lunatic, blazing away at anything that moves with massive .45 caliber automatic pistols. And by the way, have you ever fired a standard army .45 automatic pistol? I have, and it’s not something I would ever recommend as a weapon of choice for an urban vigilante. The pistol was developed in the throes of the US occupation of the Philippines around the turn of the last century. Some of the persistent rebel warriors went amok, becoming in effect, crazed berserkers. It was found that conventional weapons could not stop the maddened charge of these sword welding Amokers. But a .45 caliber automatic pistol slug would. It would knock a charging man over flat on his back. The bullet killed by shock, not penetration, and it was an effective sidearm for officers and soldiers who needed to deal with enemy fighters who got too close for comfort. The effective range of a .45 automatic is about 25 meters (82 feet). You are really taking long chances aiming at anything past sixty feet. Yet The Shadow uses these weapons to pick off gangsters in fleeing autos, sentries guarding warehouses a half block away, and withers ranks of opponents across wide city boulevards. Unbelievable is too kind a word here. And by the way, this weapon happens to be a single action recoil repeater, which means that the hammer has to be hand cocked before the first round can actually be fired. Of course, none of that ever bothered The Shadow. He carried a brace of these firearms, and often had two more fully loaded extras along with him for situations that he thot might require sustained firepower. Despite these and some other lesser story flaws, this is an engaging series, one I find extremely addictive. As of this month, the series is up to number #97, with three more issues already in the pipeline. Considering that there were only 325 Shadow stories all total, it appears that Sanctum Books is going to come to the end of this run, soon. All too soon there will be no more Shadow novels to reprint, and that will be a pity, because, flaws and all, I am really enjoying these stories. I can easily understand how the reading public in the character’s golden years of the 1930s would eagerly scoop up the latest issue and make The Shadow Magazine one of the top selling pulp magazines of the period, with sales often over the 800,000 copy mark. Walter Gibson had a vivid imagination, and was able to create plot scenarios out of unusual, even bizarre situations, territory that any other normal writer would consider to be fallow ground not even worth investigating. Generally the stories, particularly the pre 1939 stories, play fair with the reader. You don’t know who the guilty person is, and in the cases where The Shadow faces off against a known opponent, such as The Wasp, or Shiwan Khan, or the Voodoo Master, you may know who the bad guy is, but you don’t know his master plan or what his goals are, much less how he plans to go about achieving those goals while fending off the efforts of The Shadow to thwart his crimes. Every adventure is a challenge for the reader as well as for The Shadow. From the beginning of each story, with its ingenious criminal, thru the Shadow’s deductions, and his efforts to deal with the problem, right thru the raging gun battles, dangerous confrontations, thrilling dangers and multiple murders that lead to the sensational ending and the thwarting of the master villain, these are stories that hold the reader’s imagination from start to finish. Every new issue is a lure. Every time one of these trade paperbacks arrives, I find that no matter how busy I am with other matters, even very important matters that have to be dealt with right away, that somehow I always manage to make the time to sit down, open that book and start reading. And keep on reading. Sometimes I flash right thru the two adventures in a few days. Sometimes it takes me a week. Except for those issues which feature a total clunker it never takes me more than a week to polish off the entire book. Each trade paperback comes with some background information and commentary, and often also comes with reprints of comic strips, comic book stories or Shadow radio scripts from shows not in circulation that Gibson was involved with. Issue after issue I usually conclude that this was the best fifteen bucks I’ve spent that month on reading entertainment, and then I have to wait three or so weeks until the next volume comes out.

7 One of the biggest challenges readers who want to share this experience face is finding places where copies of these trade paperbacks are for sale. Many book stores, including some national chains do not carry these books. Barnes & Noble does not carry these books. They can be found at some comic book stores, and they can be pre-ordered thru the monthly Previews catalog that Diamond Comics provides, so if anybody reading this is getting a comic sub at any comic store, he can pre-order the upcoming volumes, and may be able to back order some of the other recent numbers. Finding copies on the internet is not much better. Most of the major book selling web sites including Alibris and Amazon do not offer these books as regular items, altho some co-op sellers on those sites do offer the occasional volume now and again. Those interested who cannot find copies locally or who do not have access to a comic store close by can go directly to the web site of Sanctum Books, which is--- http://www.shadowsanctum.com/pulps.html Please be aware there are several different Sanctum Books with a web presence. The one you want is the one with the Shadow mentioned in the URL. Subscriptions are available at a very slight discount from the publisher, and many, but not all, back issues are still available. And for those who have an interest in the radio program, radio researcher Martin Grams has published a massive book that covers the radio program from its earliest inception until it’s end, including the syndicated reissues of the sixties and seventies. This has vast amounts of background detail, the crowning effort of ten years worth of research. Grams had access to all the surviving Shadow scripts, and is able to offer plot synopsises of almost every show, info on production details, writers, directors, actors, and lots more. The title is “The Shadow: The History and Mystery of the Radio Program, 1930-1954”, ISBN #978-0982531112; retail price $44.95, but sold at a discount many places including the major internet book sites. It’s remarkable when you think about it. Here is a urban vigilante character created almost by accident, that became a publishing phenomenon during one of the most turbulent decades in domestic American history, a character very much of his time period, yet a character whose popularity and fame has endured year in and year out. And now, in a brand new century, these stories still hold their appeal and are reaching a whole new audience who never had a chance to read them when they were originally published. I can’t think of many other literary creations that have this kind of staying power. It is a tribute to the unique appeal of the character himself, but mostly, it is an enduring tribute to Walter Gibson, the man whose fertile imagination shaped The Shadow concept into a viable character and wove all those involved plots that continue to hold such deep fascination for readers almost a hundred years after they were first written.

8 THE HPL STATUETTE

– -----Continued

Gavin Gallaghan

There was a huge debate on Facebook a few months back, about the issue of renaming/changing the World Fantasy Awards Lovecraft-statuette. Nearly everyone in the field of Lovecraft criticism and scholarship had their say, including prominent biographer S.T. Joshi, who responded visa his webpage blog. Basically, the controversy seems to range between two rival camps: one, which I’ll call the Older Camp, says that HPL was a fascist, and that the fantasy award should no longer be a statuette of Lovecraft himself. The other, which I’ll call the Joshi camp, says that HPL’s fascism was merely a negligible aspect of his life and career, that his racism did not have any noticeable effect on the majority of his weird fiction, and that therefore the Lovecraft statue should remain as it is. Interestingly, and contrary to what some may assume, the disagreement here is not between liberals on one side, and reactionaries on the other. In fact both the Older’s side and Joshi’s are strongly liberal; Joshi himself is basically a socialist and an avowed atheist, as are many of those who agree with him. Rather, what we are seeing here is sort of an internecine disagreement within leftist/liberalism itself; between those who retain some vestige of belief in free speech, and those who—like Mao and Stalin before them—believe in airbrushing the past to suit modern political fashions and sensitivities. For what it’s worth, my opinion sits directly between these two rival camps. One the one hand, I strongly disagree with Joshi, and agree with the Older faction, that HPL was very much a fascist. Indeed, I believe that HPL’s fascism and racism are the central and most important aspects of his life and thought, informing the vast majority of his philosophy, political thought, emotional life, and weird fiction. Yes, like W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and many other writers around this same time, Lovecraft was very much, and often unapologetically so, a fascist writer. But on the other hand, I also disagree with the Older faction, and believe the award statuette should not be changed. To do so, again, reeks of Orwellian political revisionism like that seen during the Cultural Revolution in China, where public figures suddenly found themselves fashionable one day, the unmentionable the next; their names edited out of official texts. Once you start airbrushing the past in order to sanitize unpleasant realities, where do you stop? Our currency? Our monuments in Washington? Our history books? That said, I realize it is just a matter of time before the ride of emotion rolls over, and the Older faction prevails. The Director’s Guild in Hollywood has already been forced to replace/rename the D.W. Griffith Award, with the more innocently titled Director’s Guild Award. (Luckily DG’s initials happen to exactly match those of the director’s guild, maybe a similar stratagem will enable Howard Lovecraft to remain associated with a renamed Horror Lover’s Award, at least in spirit). In South Africa, too, the statue of Cecil Rhodes was recently removed from the University of Cape Town. And I recently read about another politician’s face or name being removed from somewhere else (the exact details elude me at this moment), on the grounds that he, like a vast number of people in the USA during his era, believed in white supremacy. Unfortunately all this revisionism (on the grounds of not offending various peoples’ sensitivities, whatever they may be), will eventually come around to bite liberals in the butt in a few years, when they find

9 themselves on the receiving end of a new mob’s inevitable crusade. As my friend Robin Snyder once observed, the historical pendulum has an odd way of swinging back in the opposite direction. Consider that 50 years ago, if you did/said or wrote anything pro-homosexual, you were labeled as degenerate/unwholesome/perverse. Now, 50 years later, if you refuse to endorse/admire the homosexual lifestyle, you are labeled as bigoted/fascist/perverse. Who knows, 50 years from now, what the new law of the land will be? The same activists so intent on stamping out Western European racism today may find themselves labeled as degenerate/evil or corrupt in the near future, due to things like their failure, or unwillingness, to recognize the personhood of unborn children in the womb. Who can say? In the 1800s it was plain as punch to some, but not to others, that slaves were property, not people. Nowadays that position is unthinkable, at least in the Western world. Until we become omnipotent, we’ll all have out moral blind spots. That said, I’m sorry to report that there is a minority of pro-Fascists, who apparently take HPL’s racial views as their own. I found a website online for a publisher called Cross-Currents, which publishes neo-fascist books by people like Jonathan Bowden, Alex Kurtagic, and others. And included amongst their catalog is Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror In Literature”, as well as some of HPL’s earliest, most racist essays from his amateur journal The Conservative. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would believe Fascism is a legitimate political philosophy these days, after all the horrors of WWII, but some people are dunces. (Incidentally, I was on the receiving end of a rather frenzied verbal attack in the Amazon site reviews for my book of Lovecraft criticism, “Dark Arcadia”. The attack was anonymous, but I tend to think it was written by one or more of the Cross-Currents authors; the literary style seemed similar to theirs. Meanwhile, the discussion concerning the suitability of the Lovecraft statue continues.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + BACK ISSUES of this publication are available in limited quantities. Each issue is for sale at $6.00 per copy, sent postage paid anywhere in the US. Please make payment to Robert Jennings, NOT the title of the fanzine, since I have a bank account, but the magazine does not. #16 The Atomic Knights, Rin-Tin-Tin on radio, reviews #18 Wonder Stories Magazine, Little Orphan Annie on the radio #19 in depth book reviews, the Stay Tuned For Terror series #20 Windycon 37, Comet Stories Magazine #21 Kay Kyser’s Batman crossover, Lena Horne #22 Marvel Science Stories Magazine, Kindle e-book revolution #32 Tales of Magic & Mystery Magazine; Robert Centela on cartooning from prison #33 Analysis of comic book sales projections, Spacehawk, fiction #34 Boskone 50, Rod Serling’s career, classic movie reviews #35 look at recent animated films on DVD, Sgt. Preston’s gold mine deed gamble, fiction #36 Roger Ebert’s life & career, game convention crisis, One Meat Ball traced thru history, Book Bender #37 John Campbell’s super science space operas, Groucho Marx on the radio #38 building Dominic Flandry’s rife, Miracle Science Stories #40 Bobby Benson’s media wide career, Book Bender #44 Gerald Kersh, Bomba the Jungle Boy

Our Higher Purpose

David B. Williams

Not surprisingly, this too began with Hugo Gernsback.

He published what he chose to call “scientifiction” stories in his radio and electronics magazines years before he launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine dedicated to SF.

Since he wasn't responding to a market demand by providing SF stories to his amateur-radio and science- hobbyist readers, Gernsback must have thought this type of story conveyed some special value to this audience. He didn't give them westerns or detective thrillers.

Radio was the most futuristic development in the early 20th century. Telegraph and telephone signals traveled along visible wires, like wagons along roads and barges along canals. Electricity also traveled through wires, like water or gas through pipes.

But radio signals were invisible, undetectable until captured and converted to sound by an electronic receiver. Radio signals went everywhere, even passing through solid walls, unconfined to any kind of preexisting conduit. This was sense-of-wonder technology.

Gernsback's readers were up to speed on this new technology and wanted to know what was coming next. They viewed science as an endless cornucopia of progress. They were future-oriented and expected more big changes and amazing technologies to come, an ideal audience for the scientifiction stories Gernsback offered them.

But Gernsback wasn't just providing entertainment to these readers. He believed SF's mission was to awaken readers to the power and potential of science, to stimulate the imaginations of scientists and inventors, and even inspire readers to seek careers in science. The readers who read about future wonders could then help to make those wonders come true. Unlike westerns, detective tales, or love stories, SF had a job to do. SF had a higher purpose.

In 1926, Gernsback described the ideal SF story as “a charming romance interwoven with scientific fact and prophetic vision," proclaiming his model of SF as a bearer of science education and prediction. And he never changed his mind. When he launched his last SF magazine, Science-Fiction Plus, in 1953, the subtitle was “preview of the future.”

Gernsback emphasized this higher purpose in his editorials, and he transmitted this kind of thinking to his readers. It's no surprise that the earliest stirrings of organized SF fandom came from

11 science hobbyists who were at least as interested in the science of SF as in the fiction.

The first two recognized fanzines were pubbed by these amateur-science enthusiasts. The Comet appeared in May 1930 as the journal of the Science Correspondence Club, followed two months later by The Planet from the New York Scienceers. The pages of both publications were devoted to science, although The Planet also included reviews of recent prozine content.

The International Scientific Association tried to mix the amateur scientists and SF fans, but the fans soon became dominant. The first two eastern SF conferences (Philadelphia 1936, New York City 1937) were essentially exchange visits between delegations from the ISA's two major branches.

The growing rift between science and science fiction was the first dispute to roil fandom's first decade. But that dispute didn't spark widespread feuding. The fans simply won by attrition. The focus on science gradually waned, replaced by increasing attention to SF and to fandom itself.

But if fandom wasn't about promoting science, what was it about? If, as Gernsback claimed, SF had a higher purpose, shouldn't SF fandom also have a higher purpose? This question would plunge all fandom into war.

The Futurians, a group of New York City fans who coalesced around Donald A. Wollheim in the mid-1930s (and thus were initially known in fandom as “Wollheimists”), would prove to be the driving force behind this conflict.

In addition to Wollheim, key Futurians included John Michel, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert “Doc” Lowndes, and in a widening circle, Richard Wilson, Dave Kyle, Damon Knight, James Blish, Larry Shaw, Jack Gillespie, even Isaac Asimov, though he was really only one of several social affiliates who did not participate in actual combat.

Wollheim and his circle could not continence the idea that fandom could be just for fun. Gernsback had already explained that SF had a higher purpose. The Futurians believed that SF fandom also needed a higher purpose.

Wollheim classified most fans as “shallow-minded adolescents” and considered discussion of SF as “childish” and “inane.” His goal was to “raise science fiction from merely a childish puerile hobby to being an active force toward the realization of those things that science fiction has always believed.”

At the third eastern convention in Philadelphia in 1938, Wollheim read a speech entitled “Mutation or Death,” written by fellow Futurian Michel, whose severe stutter made him incapable of delivering the oration. This speech introduced the doctrines of “Michelism” to fandom.

According to Wollheim, "Michelism is the belief that science-fiction fans should actively work for the realization of the scientific socialist world-state as the only genuine justification [emphasis added] for their activities."

The address ended with a proposed resolution:

"THEREFORE: Be it moved that this, the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention, shall place itself on record as opposing all forces leading to barbarism, the advancement of pseudo-sciences and militaristic ideologies, and shall further resolve that science-fiction should by nature [emphasis added] stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life."

After prolonged debate, the motion was defeated 12-8, with several abstentions. No one voted against the resolution's content, but the opponents did object to introducing politics into fan affairs.

12 In 1940, as General Secretary of the Futurian League, Wollheim defined a Futurian as one who, through SF [emphasis added], attains a vision of a greater world, a greater future for the whole of mankind. A Futurian seeks to utilize his idealistic convictions, always in democratic, impersonal, and unselfish ways, for the betterment of the world.

General Secretary! Lurking behind all this was Communism, the doctrine that dared not speak its name. Textbook Communism (“the scientific socialist world-state”) embodied all the Utopian principles that appealed to idealists in the 1930s. Several Futurians joined or attended meetings of the Young Communist League, and Michel joined the Party when he was old enough.

The question remains as to whether “Michelism” was really initiated by Michel or whether Wollheim nominated Michel as the titular leader to deflect attention from himself. Recall that President Truman, fearing Congressional opposition to anything that bore his name, cunningly called his reconstruction program for Europe “the Marshall Plan.”

Some kind of conflict was inevitable when the first World SF Convention convened in New York in July 1939, because the Futurians had lost ownership of the event. Leading Futurians had been appointed to the planning committee two years earlier but had accomplished nothing. So, at the Newark “national convention” in 1938, Sam Moskowitz, William Sykora, and their New Fandom group stepped forward and were authorized to form a new organizing committee.

It must have been bitterly infuriating to the Futurians to know that they had allowed this plum to be plucked from their fingers by their despised opponents, and then to see those opponents host a very successful, even historic, meeting.

As fans from across the country gathered in Caravan Hall, the Futurians handed out pamphlets crying alarm and warning fans about the nefarious plans of the “controlling clique.” Headings included “Beware of the Dictatorship!” and “High Handed Tactics.”

This agitprop salvo perturbed chairman Moskowitz, who feared that the Futurians were bent on disrupting the convention. He therefore decreed that any Futurian not already in the hall who did not pledge to behave would be banned from the proceedings.

Futurians Cyril Kornbluth, Chester Cohen, John B Michel, Robert RAW Lowndes, and Don Wollheim in July 1939

13 Six of the Futurians (Gillespie, Kornbluth, Lowndes, Michel, Pohl, Wollheim) refused to give such an assurance and, as a result, never got to attend the First Worldcon. Thus arose the infamous Exclusion Act.

Moskowitz later speculated that the targeted Futurians welcomed their exclusion, because they thereby gained the advantageous position of victims. Crying injustice and fascism, they subsequently garnered widespread sympathy throughout fandom.

Anyway, the war was on to expunge fascism and restore democratic principles to fannish affairs. Fanzines on both sides were filled with accusatory diatribes. It was hard to find fans who didn't take sides. It was hard for fans who didn't give a damn to enjoy SF and fandom in peace.

But in their quest to give fandom a higher purpose, the Futurians had chosen the wrong tactics. Even sympathetic fans came to resent the intrusion of politics into fandom, for whatever reason. And the Futurians' aggressive attacks on their opponents became more and more tiresome to uncommitted observers.

And what was all the fuss about? What the Futurians offered was not an action program but resolutions. For them, it was enough that fandom express its support for Right Thinking. This was all very exciting. They were engaged in the Great Struggle. They were doing something.

But it was all talk. The Futurians did not choose to engage in the politics of the Real World. Instead, they focused their considerable energies on becoming SF writers and editors and disrupting fandom with their obstreperous behavior. They were successful in both endeavors.

It became widely believed that the Futurians' operating principle was simply “Rule or Ruin.” For example, Wollheim and three Futurian acolytes showed up at a meeting of the Sykora-led Queens SFL chapter and joined. This seemed odd because Sykora was on the Futurian enemies list. However, he was absent from that meeting and no one objected to admitting the new members.

It wasn't long before the Futurians sparked dissension with a motion to send a delegate to a leftist youth congress. Director James Taurasi blocked a vote. The Futurians accused him of dictatorship and initiated impeachment proceedings. They also blackballed new members who were known to oppose Michelism.

Sykora skipped some meetings because of the newly hostile atmosphere, and the Futurians used an attendance requirement in the bylaws to expel him. Taurasi was subjected to a second impeachment proceeding and resigned in disgust. Both sides appealed to SFL headquarters at Thrilling Wonder Stories. Leo Margulies, magazine publisher and SFL director, dispensed with the problem by declaring the chapter dissolved.

In just six months, the Futurians had penetrated and destroyed an active and growing club. If the original plan had been to take over the SFL chapter, the Futurians had made wonderful progress, expelling the president and forcing the director to resign. But dissolution of the chapter left the Futurians with nothing to control.

They then formed The Futurian Science-Literary Society of New York, but most of the non-Futurians followed Sykora and Taurasi into a new and thriving Queens SFL. So in the end, the Futurians won a Pyrrhic victory.

In 1945, after a pause for World War II, several Futurians holding FAPA offices resigned and formed the Vanguard Amateur Press Association with an all-Futurian board. Based on past performance, it was immediately alleged that they were set on wrecking FAPA and replacing it with an apa they totally controlled.

But that was the end of it. The World War had changed things. Real fascism had been defeated on the battlefield, and Communism had revealed itself as a flawed Ghod. In the post-War world, and following internal dissensions (revolutions always devour their own), the Futurians dispersed and turned to grown-up careers and marriages. Fandom could no longer demand the total commitment of their energies and ambitions. It was time to get on with life.

Gernsback's faith in SF's power to educate readers and inspire them to enter the sciences was not totally misplaced. A number of space scientists have acknowledged that reading SF in their formative years helped to guide them into scientific careers. But they certainly didn't learn their science from SF, and the number of scientists truly recruited by SF was minimal.

Of more concern within the genre was the effect of Gernsback's formula on the development of SF as fiction. Western stories didn't screech to a halt to explain how cattle-ranching worked. Why did SF stories need to pause to explain the science? Rather than the Father of Magazine Science Fiction, fandom might have chosen to honor Gernsback as the Father of the Info Dump.

Following the glory days of Gernsback's preeminence, writers and critics began to challenge his literary ideology. According to Gary Westfahl in the online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: “Some maintain that Gernsback's impact on sf was harmful because it led to a sterilized and didactic insistence that the road to the future was best apprehended through a focus on science and technology in isolation.” He cites Brian Aldiss's assessment of Gernsback as "the worst disaster ever to hit the science fiction field" and adds: “virtually all later voices for sf reform – from John W. Campbell Jr. and H. L. Gold to the New Wave's Harlan Ellison and Cyberpunk's Bruce Sterling – have explicitly or implicitly presented their ideas as a repudiation of Gernsback.”

In the end, the Good Guys won, in both SF and fandom. SF became less concerned about scientific plausibility and prophecy and more concerned about character development and narrative technique. SF's job was to awaken a sense of wonder, not a sense of purpose. And within fandom, the advocates of science fiction and fannishness for its own sake replaced the amateur scientists and wanna-be Communists.

SF did not need to justify itself with a higher purpose, nor did its associated fandom. It was OK to just have fun.

15 Comic Book Sales Increase in 2014

Along with other observations about the comic book industry

Louis Desy Jr.

Don’t let the title of this article throw you. We are going to take a look at an unusual situation, a conflict in either terms of information or unedited reporting, and try to figure out what is actually happening with comic book sales these days, again. The recent incentive for this article was a story released by The HollyWood Reporter at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/comic-book-sales-increase-2014-806269 which was sent to me by a Google news story alert and the title of that story is the byline that I have used for this article.

Some of you may recall that I wrote a similar story for Fadeaway #33 (Feb/Mar 2013), where I examined a series of then recent stories reporting the ‘rise’ in comic book sales. The trends from that article seem to be continuing two years after that article, which is not surprising since, who wants to report bad news, and the trend, if looked at over a small enough time span is positive. Of course, part of the recent ‘up trend’ in sales is that the industry had a disastrous downturn in the recession (depression?) years of 2008/2009, but has been on an up trend since that trough of the business cycle. One of the better things people will like about this article, I think, is that I saw the letters of comments on my prior article, and was able to get charts that I think will clearly show the trends for sales, both in total number of units and dollar volumes: http://www.comichron.com/vitalstatistics/alltime.html

The first chart shows the number of units sold by Diamond Distributing from September 1996 to March 2015 in 6 month increments. The second chart shows data for the same time period but in total dollars instead of units.

The first chart shows number of units with a big drop off in 1996/1997, that has never recovered since that time. This was the ‘tail end’ of the mid 1990s comic book bust. As of September 1996, the bust for that cycle was well under way and September 1996 was that ‘tail end’ of that decline. One important line is the solid white line (top solid line) on the chart, which are the unit sales in each time period. Also telling is the dotted white line which is a trend line over the time period that shows the trend (the dashed line is a running average of the solid line); which shows a slow decline over the 20 years since it is sloping slightly down.

16 Comic Books Ordered by Comics Shops in North America (in units)

Comic Books Ordered by Comics Shops in North America (in dollars)

Total dollar value of sales did increase, and are way up when compared to almost any prior time period, but total units sales are way down from the past, with the trend line sloping down, plus the increase in total dollar volume did not even rise to the level of the bust years when inflation is factored in.

From the second chart, things look great, since total dollars in 2014 are higher than Sept 1996 (solid white line which is the solid top line) and even the trend line (dashed white line) is showing an increase over the time periods. The only problem is that the big implosion in 1997, (which was probably due to the failure of Marvel messing up the distribution chain with its Hero’s World), the inflation adjusted sales are not higher than that even after 20 years.

The first part of the problem in the mid 1990s was the comic book bust. The owner of Mile High Comics gives a short description of how bad the bust was at that time. It was not just that comic book stores were ‘making less money’, the problem was that many stores/companies were losing money for weeks or months on end: http://www.milehighcomics.com/tales/cbg42.html “As I candidly related a couple of columns ago, 1996 was a terrible year for Mile High Comics. Our stores were still performing well, but our mail order catalogs suddenly stopped producing any revenue. Since mail order was the source of 90% of our earnings, we started bleeding working capital at the rate of over $1,000 per day.” – quote from Mile High Comics in Denver, CO

Here is a brief recap of the disaster that was Marvel’s decision to setup Hero’s World, which cased additional industry problems from 1996/1997, and this was on top of the bust from the mid 1990s comic book boom. http://www.milehighcomics.com/tales/cbg129.html The owner of Mile High Comics estimates that Marvel ruined around 30%+ of the comic book market. This is probably the big drop off in 1997 that lingered for years. For a short recap, Marvel, that made up about 50% of the comic book publishing at that time, decided that it would be a ‘great idea’ to setup their own distribution system and distribute their items through that offshoot exclusively. The problem is that Hero’s World was a ‘complete disaster’ plus with half of the volume gone from the comic book distribution system for every other distributor, many collapsed and closed due to losing half of their business overnight. http://www.milehighcomics.com/tales/cbg129.html “In last week's column, I gave a very condensed version of how I viewed the decision by Marvel Comics to self- distribute their own publications during the late-1990's. Suffice it to say, the exercise was a disaster right from the beginning. Not only did the Heroes World Distributing company lack the infrastructure to ship Marvel's weekly sales volume, but the Heroes World management team failed miserably in the PR war to win the hearts and minds of comics retailers. In fact, rather than win over any converts to Marvel, the hassle of having to place two new comics orders each month (sometimes at a lower overall discount), plus paying freight costs on Heroes World shipments, pushed many comics retailers to the brink of closing their stores.” – quote from Mile High Comics in Denver, CO

My friend Roger Anderson, use to mention every once in a while that Hero’s World caused him all kinds of problems and that it affected everyone within the industry. One big problem was that since Hero’s World only carried Marvel titles, stores had to place two orders every month, one to Hero’s World for the Marvel titles, and another order for all of the other publishers. One of the interesting problems with the setup with Hero’s World, that I had never heard before, is that their phone system failed their first week. According to Mile High Comics, he recounted how while they did anticipate a lot of phone calls being made to fix problems, and put in a new phone system to handle the calls, the equipment was installed in a room with no ventilation. As a result, the phone system overheated and was not working for three or four days, causing all kinds of problems since stores that had problems with their orders where unable to contact anyone to fix such problems. (http://www.milehighcomics.com/tales/cbg129.html ) They also recount that some store owners decided to close, in part, because of the additional problems Hero’s World was causing for their business. In the end, Hero’s World got bought up by Diamond Distributing.

In short, the starting points of the left side of both charts could be described as two disasters combining and making each other worse. The comics book boom busting and then Hero’s World fiasco, adding to the problems was, in short, “a catastrophe in the middle of a disaster”. On both charts, the starting point on the chart in 1996 was at a time that was in the middle of a bust already. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheGreatComicsCrashOf1996 )

I looked at the CPI over the same time periods. The CPI shows that prices increased on average by 46% for the twenty years covered by the charts. So by taking the starting number of $25 million dollars in 1996, which was in the middle of a bust, and adding 46% for inflation, means that Sept 2014 sales should be at least $36.5 million to be even for inflation after 20 years. As you will note, the chart only goes up to $35 million and none of the lines reach that number, which is pretty bad since that means that after 20 years, the total dollar values of comic book sales has not reached or come near exceeding the starting time that was in the middle of two major disasters for comic book sales.

While I can understand that someone reporting on this does not want to make the story all ‘doom and gloom’ since people as a general rule do not like to read something negative or depressing, it does bother me that they would leave the reader with the impression that things are going great in the industry or for comics book sales. I would even argue that it is irresponsible reporting, since people read news because they want to know what is going on (at least I do), whether it is bad or good. I do not want to be treated as someone ‘who can not handle the truth’ or be told that everything is happy and the all is well, when it is not. Of course, maybe in today’s world people would prefer and want endless entertainment, and to believe in a ‘fairy tale’ instead of facing reality, but I do not think this is good for the long run since you can’t fix problems until you admit or know there is a problem and know how bad the problem is. It also bothers me that stories like the Hollywood Reporter is putting out are giving everyone the impression that things are going great, in spite of the fact that more and more comic book stores are closing all the time, showing that things are not going well.

I thought that after the recession of 2008/2009 that any store that made it thru that crisis alive, would be ok, but I am now seeing a new wave of store closings. It looks like the ones that somehow held on are not doing ok, and many may have only held out to the end of their leases in order to close without being out all kinds of money having to pay off the remainder of the property lease. I can understand a store doing that since it would be bad enough to be not making that much money each month for all the work a store owner put in, it would be far worse to be ‘on the hook’ for lease payments on an empty store space for a closed and gone store, paying eve more money out until the terms of the lease ends.

Some of the companies in the comic book industry could have a great effect on how things run and how well the comic book stores do, and whether they survive or not, but all of them seem to have no interest in what happens at the retail level, as long as they get paid each month for what they print. The publishers contributed to the problems in the industry by allowing the comic book boom to erupt in the mid 1990s, printing multiple story lines and runs with all kinds of gimmicks to sell comics (multiple variant covers, issuing new comic books that had awful/stupid story lines that no one would read after a few issues instead of good stories, crossovers between different comic books, multiple variants) instead of just writing and drawing more good stories, and printing more copies of those comics. If publishers had done that, I think they would have retained more core readers over the years. Marvel took this whole printing everything possible mind-set to such an extreme that in 1998 that went bankrupt, the end result of declines and the implosion in comics book sales in the 1990s along with the Hero’s World fiasco. Hopefully, comic book publishers today will not repeat the mistakes of the past and will allow the industry to grow again by writing good stories, with good artwork, which would draw new readers and promote the industry again. But then again, greed and the urge to jump on the bandwagon of whatever the latest hot sales trend happens to be have always been motivating forces in the comic book business, at every level, top to bottom. So I’m not holding my breath that things will be better in the immediate future for the comics industry.

19 READER REACTION

Ken Faig, Jr.; 2311 Swainwood Dr., Glenview, IL 60025-2741

Many thanks for favoring me with FADEAWAY #45, although since I have nothing to trade, you should probably just let me look at your zine on efanzines.com. I do "surf" on that site from time to time. It is a remarkable assemblage of good fan stuff. One could construct the replica of a traditional paper apa on the internet: posting area for the month's zines, areas for comment by members, nominations for laureate awards, etc. I wonder if the dues could be as low as $5-10 per year to pay for the internet space? But the question is: who would be willing to invest the time and talent to construct such an animal? If it is to be democratically governed, what is to say it won't be taken away from its inventor at the very first election. Censorship would be a tricky matter. I'd recommend a requirement of adult age for membership & no censorship. But there will always be objections to some postings. Overall, I don't think it will happen. Meanwhile, the paper apas continue to die. Many folks can't afford to publish any kind of substantial zine on paper, even for a circulation as low as say 25. Able article on Zagat. Interesting letter column. Hlavaty writes sanely about the WFC award controversy. WFC hitched its wagon to the Lovecraft draft horse from the start in 1975. Now it will probably decide to un-hitch. So be it. WFC will survive without Lovecraft & Lovecraft will survive without WFC. Next thing you know, some of the radical anti-HPLites will want to banish his work from the dealers' room. Reasonable people can differ about the elimination of Lovecraft's image from the WFC awards. I say fine if that is where WFC wants to go. If I don't want to go to that place, that's my right, too. In its infancy, WFC was glad to adopt the image of Lovecraft for its awards and to hold its first convention in his native city. Now that his racist writings (mostly from private letters) have been published, WFC is just as happy to walk away from Lovecraft to suit its international clientele. Is the writer who turns his WFC award with the image of "the fucker" to the wall to avoid looking at him free of hatred? I think hatred is far from gone from this world--just consider the phenomenon of terrorism (Tsarnaev brothers, etc.). I only dropped the EOD because doing 55 copies (40 for the apa and 15 for personal distribution) of 25-page zines had gotten beyond my budget in retirement. I think REHUPA is at least partially electronic. An e-apa would need discipline to avoid degenerating into a chat room or bulletin board. I agree with you that successes may be rare. Then general-interest paper-based apas seem to be struggling. For one thing, their demographic is age 70+.

///I don’t think anybody is advocating doing away with Lovecraft or trying to undermining his tremendous influence on the development of the modern supernatural/horror genre. The problem is that Lovecraft was an overt and often vocal racist, who also wasn’t too happy about the shifting social strata during his lifetime. Those views might have been acceptable to many people during the years Lovecraft lived, but times have changed, and one of the best things about modern society is that we have largely done away with this kind of racism and prejudice. To offer a statue of a determined racist as the highest trophy given out by the group for achievement in modern supernatural/horror writing seems inappropriate. 20 To be honest I personally always thot the idea of using a Lovecraft statue as the award trophy was pretty lame. Even tho the science fiction community gives out yearly awards called “Hugos”, named after Hugo Gernsback, the original creator/editor of Amazing Stories, the world’s first official all science fiction magazine, the trophy itself was never an effigy of Gernsback. It has always been a rocket, and a different symbol, not a cast characture of Lovecraft should have been the trophy for the group handing out awards in the field of supernatural horror. And finally, a mere forty+ years later, this mistake will be rectified. There are some internet apas going right now. There have been others in the past that are defunct. Some apas, such as APA-Q are a combination of both print and internet (email) submissions. Pure internet apas have not fared particularly well over time. Part of the problem may be that internet chat rooms, and internet bulletin boards offer faster and more immediate exposure for the members who are interested. The amateur PRESS association assumes that its members are interested in and are willing to produce a publication of some kind as part of their membership duties. Most internet apas I have experienced have some offerings that could be classified as publications, but a lot of members just shoot off random postings, with perhaps a few capitalized lines as a header and a few more lines of info to let the other members know who is doing the posting. That is not truly an apa, and the turnover of members in internet apa groups is very rapid. Time will tell if something can evolve that meets the definition, or at least the spirit, of an apa in the internet setting, but right now, the results have not been encouraging. There are still print apas out there doing well. It may be a format in decline, but there are still people interested, including me. I am a long time member of SFPA (The Southern Fandom Press Alliance), a bi- monthly science fiction oriented print apa with mailings that usually run in the 350-400 page level. The urge to zine may well be one of those odd genetic patterns that determines and separates a trufan from other folk interested in SF literature, but not truly involved in fandom.///

Charles Rector; 524 Lake Ave. – Apt #3; Woodstock, IL 60098

Just got Fadeaway in the mail and its the only time I've ever got a fanzine via post office. That's what happens when you live in rural/small town areas. I first found out about fanzines by discovering Ted White/Elinor Mavor era Amazings and Fantastics at a used bookstore in Fayetteville, AR in the late 1980's. However, I could not ever find any of them around nor did I know of any SF fans or clubs until 1997 when I moved to Little Rock for a few years. There, the fans I met said that they had heard of fanzines, but never seen any themselves and they just assumed that there were no fanzines any more. Then one day in 2012, I saw Planetary Stories in my Google results and I eventually wound up at eFanzines and have been having a wonderful time getting caught up with all the fine stuff there. Speaking of blasts from the past, what happened to all the Fadeaways prior to #28? Do you still have some laying around that you have never bothered posting to EFanzines? Hope you can get your eyesight fixed and you can stop making all those typos like hoards instead of hordes and the like. Although from what you've said in earlier Fadeways, it sounds like even when your eyesight was a lot better, you had a reputation for typos. In any event, the letters are always a blast so much so you could have a full issue without any feature articles and it would still be great.

///I am well neigh croggled that you’ve never seen a print fanzine thru most of your years of involvement with the science fiction hobby! Yes, there are still print fmz out there, and there are still print amateur press associations (apas) doing well even in this digital age. I only started posting Fadeaway issues on the eFanzine.com web site with issue #28. Issues #1 thru #15 were produced in the 1960s and all those copies are long gone. I published other fanzines over the years, but decided to revive Fadeaway around 2009 and started back up using the original numbering. I have been conflicted about posting issues on the internet. There has been some interest in having some of my articles collected and issued as print books, and several editors have suggested having all the stuff out there for free on the web would seriously cripple any book sales to individual buyers. Of course, no book deal has ever materialized, and I’m still writing articles about old magazines, and obscure, antique SF/fantasy subjects so I suppose there is plenty of time to consider it down the line. The other factor that bothers me is that with only rare instances, the people who read the issues over the internet never bother to write letters of comment or acknowledge the publication in any way. One of the primary purposes of producing a fanzine is to encourage communication between myself and interested readers. What’s the point of posting issues on the web if the people who read it don’t care enuf to bother even acknowledging the issues or write LOCs?

21 I had cataract surgery on my right eye in early June and the recovery has gone well. My vision is muchly improved, but better vision will have no effect on my penchant for making spelling mistakes and typos. My apazine is titled The Typo King, and bad as the spelling errors may seem to you these days, quite frankly things are dramatically better than they were in years past, due mainly to the greatest invention of the 20th century: spellchecker. Still, even a computer spellchecker system can only do so much, especially when faced with my pitiful spelling and typing skills. Just think of them as part of local flavor of the fanzine. So far as global warming is concerned, nobody doubts that the planet is warming---we’ve been on a warming rebound since the last ice age. The question is how much effect human industrialization is having on the climate. Pouring zillions of tons of soot and pollutants into the air cannot be having any kind of good effect on human life, let alone the weather, and it is obvious at this point that the climate is changing. How much and how severe this is going to be is still debatable, but already we are seeing serious problems with extremely harsh winters in the eastern US and western Europe, while the western US and parts of Asia are undergoing crippling drought. Melting Antarctic glaciers are slowly raising the ocean levels, which will sooner or later have an effect on all that beach-front property vacation resorts the rich people enjoy, or more seriously, it will adversely affect the harbors the human race uses for water transportation. None of this is good, and at the very least we ought to be addressing the problem of air and water pollution if only for our short-term health benefit.///

Dale Speirs; Box 6830; Calgary, Alberta; CANADA T2P 2E7

I had been curious how you and other New England fans made out this winter with all that snow. Alberta had a very mild winter with only a few snowfalls, none more than 10 cm. Spring has been warm and dry to the point that my garden flowers are blooming two weeks ahead of normal schedule. I don't pay attention to the Hugo Awards but the buzz is all over the place and it is impossible to avoid hearing about it. I skip over all the is-not-is-too squabbling. My only comment is that somebody should form a rock band called Gamergate and the Sad Puppies. Your run-in with the fellow who blamed all of society's ills on movie serials reminds me of my encounter with the stamp collector who blamed the decline of Western civilization on postage stamps being lithographed instead of engraved as they once were. He had grown up in the era of engraved stamps and didn't like modern printing methods. Kids these days don't collect stamps, so when he noticed that, he concluded it was because they didn't like lithography either. Since they weren't collecting stamps, they were getting into trouble. Ergo, if Canada Post brought back engraved stamps, the juvenile delinquency rate would decline. He was quite serious about it, and would not be swayed. The controversy about the Lovecraft Awards makes me wonder how long it will be before politically-correct Canadians realize the Arthur Ellis Awards (for mystery fiction) were named after Canada's last hangman.

///Glad to hear you folks had a mild winter. I wish I could have said the same. Apparently these extremely harsh winters are going to be the norm as the climate statistics continue to roil around. I would gladly have passed half of our winter snows out to California; they really need the moisture. Yeah, the nut cases are everywhere. The thing about these kinds of characters is their willingness to project their own proclivities out and automatically assume they are causing the eminent decline and fall of civilization. The anti-fluoridation-the-water guys and the Satan-has-infiltrated-all-modern-movie-entertainment types never shut up either. I personally think one of the greatest advantages of the internet is that it allows these people a venue where they can rant and rave to their hearts content, maybe even attracting a few like- minded individuals, and thus we are spared their tirades in public or personal contact. I don’t think political correctness would intrude on a mystery fiction award named after a well known historic public hangman, but the controversy over the Lovecraft statue revolves around the fact that Lovecraft himself was a well know and bitter bigot who was not shy about making his opinions known to friends and acquaintances. To offer a statue of a determined racist as the highest trophy given out by the group for achievement in modern supernatural/horror writing seems inappropriate.///

John Purcell; 3744 Marielene Circle; College Station, TX 77845

Holy Moley, Robert! I don't think I have sent you a letter of comment in months. Most likely it was toward the end of last year because I changed my email address over to this one in mid-January 2015 after getting frustrated with my old Yahoo! account getting hacked for the third time in a year. In any event, here we are again - finally - writing about subject matter we all love: science fiction and all its permutations.

22 Of course, we also love to write about our aches and pains, and I am sorry to hear that your arthritis and vision problems are giving you fits. Getting old is no fricking fun, that's for sure. At some point this summer I need to get my eyes checked. Also, like your plans with Fadeaway, my goal is to get Askance on a more regular schedule (every 3 months), but we shall see. Most of that zine's problems are the same as yours: material. Any time you get the urge to write something - a short tale about your bookstore would be fun, I think (just an example, if you know what I mean) - feel free to send it. I shall do the same for you, but no writing projects other than short stories are in the works right now. If I come up with one suitable for your fanzine, I shall let you know. Yeah, the current Hugo Award foofaraw (insanity, as you put it, is accurate) is one for the books - see what I did there? - and the best way to counter the assault is to remain calm, buy supporting memberships, and then vote intelligently for quality works. Fans of this genre tend to be fairly informed and top of things - as much as they can these days when there is simply SO MUCH stfnal material being produced all over the place - so if we vote accordingly, instead of by name recognition, that would help. Also, fans need to get more involved with the actual workings of conventions, especially the WSFS (World Science Fiction Society) business meetings at the worldcons where actual work/discussion/amendments/etc., happen. That is something I need to do. It is one thing to talk about it, but doing it is when changes can be made. I give this entire dust-up a couple years to resolve troublesome Hugo eligibility issues. We shall see. Man, that flea market encounter was something else. That guy needs some serious medication. Sounds to me like you handled it well, as did the security fellow. And then that whole sequence of Wednesday night serial club meetings being cancelled due to weather. Weird. Well, what can I say? I chalk it up to coinkydink, nothing more. Great article about the Tomorrow Stories of Arthur Leo Zagat. He was one of the most prolific pulp writers, cranking out science fiction, fantasy, westerns, horror, detective, and so on. One quick look through the SF pulp magazines on my shelves reveals that his name is in practically every third magazine. I don't think I have ever read any of the stories in this series, though, so I thank you for this interesting article. It seems to me that the publishers of Argosy wanted to run something that would scare readers to action. Their reasoning makes sense, as you pointed out. And Zagat was definitely a good writer, which is why he was so popular. Tragic that he died so young. Come to think of it, you might know the answer to this question, Robert: were there any collections of Zagat's stories or novels ever published in paperback? If there were, I suspect Ace Books probably would have mined that vein in the early 1960s. There certainly would be a large number of them to choose from. All in all, a wonderful, interesting issue. Thank you for sending it, and I look forward to you getting it back on track. Good luck.

///Yeah, getting old is kinda a bitch, but you know, it sure beats the alternative. Altho the more I move on in years the more I understand the resignation of some old people to be done with life just to be rid of the constant pain. I’m nowhere near that point yet. Still too much stuff left to read/listen to/view/write about. Plus, I have a warehouse full of crap I’d love to turn into money before I check out of the hotel. After this year’s Hugo Awards mash-ups, I think I am strongly in favor of the idea suggested by Janice Gleb, namely that the Hugo Awards should be abolished, immediately. Let somebody interested in the project set up a vox populi award open to all of fandom and any other interested parties. Perhaps a small fee, fifty cents or so, could be established for each vote to help pay administrative costs and the production of whatever trophies are needed. The administrators could decide when and how they choose to hand out the awards. They may want to piggy-back onto a convention, or establish a banquet setting, or just decide to broadcast the results via publicity releases and the internet. Then the balloting would be open to all, and would finally represent the opinions of all interested parties. Beats the hell out of the yearly mess we’ve had to endure every single year of this century. A big part of the problem that there is so much material being produced in the genre that it is impossible for anyone to read even a respectable sampling of the stuff, let alone survey the whole field. That is one of the functions of a good book review column, altho those doesn’t cover the shorter fiction. One of the reasons the World SF Cons had so many supporting memberships in the recent past is that the con committee sent out e- book gatherings of all the fiction nominated for Hugo Awards to all con members, so individuals could get lots and lots of great fiction, presumably the best of the field, just for the cost of a membership of any type. The people who took the time to read those downloads could certainly make more intelligent voting decisions than if they had pawed thru the stuff in their own accumulations for the past year. But even then the field of SF/fantasy is just too enormous these days. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but I think it is worth noting that nominees and winners in many of the major awards rolls, Nebula, Hugo, Locus Poll etc etc, often to not contain many duplicates. So far as I know, except for the Fantasy Press hardback edition of “Seven Out of Time”, no other novels by Zagat have appeared in hardback or paperback book form until this century. There have been some stories reprinted as parts of anthologies or pulp facsimiles here and there, but my suspicion is that the rights to the

23 hundreds of stories he wrote were muddled up by his sudden death. Now that his passing is sixty+ years in the past his material is coming back into print from the small specialty houses.///

Jerry Kaufman; PO Box 25075; Seattle, WA 98165

I know it's important to you to maintain a regular, frequent schedule, but you'll hear no complaints from me if you miss a month or two - I feel overwhelmed by the number of fanzines still hitting either our Post Office box, home mailbox (it's right on the street, with our house about 20 yards back), or my email inbox. Not to mention magazines and books. But I'm glad you're feeling well enough to publish again. I am sympathetic to your thoughts about the Hugo Awards. I consider myself to be in the Social Justice Warrior camp to a great degree, and favor diversity in the works nominated, writers who attempt "literary pyrotechnics," and serious consideration of social or political issues in their plots and world-building. At the same time, I'm almost never current in my reading, so I seldom nominate or vote in the fiction awards. So I'm more of an observer than a participant. Your two choices for Best Novel of the Year are interesting, but I think that even if the "Puppy" slates had not existed, neither would have been nominated. In the case of The Martian, the book probably would not be eligible because it was self-published in 2011 (or 2012 - sources vary). (If the 2014 edition had major changes, it might be considered a new work, and so possibly eligible.) I suspect that The First Fifteen Lives... might not have been read by enough potential nominees. I've only heard about it very recently, as a short-listed nominee for a British SF award or two. But the "Puppy" slates limited choices for non-slated works in nearly every category - two of the five novels on the ballot are from their slate. So that reduced the chances of other books to be shortlisted. Enough about that - I'll move on to Arthur Leo Zagat. I've heard of him, but mostly as the butt of jokes about pulp writers with funny names. Back in the 1960s through the 1980s and beyond, Minneapolis cartoonists like Ken Fletcher bandied the name around in cartoons that parodied pulp magazine covers and at the same time worked in other jokes about SF fandom and SF history. But now I know more, if not, better, because of your long look at one of his series of stories. Did Zagat also write series of space operas? I also enjoyed the Argosy covers you included. Very nice illustrations. I note that the image of the Japanese soldier on the cover of the May 27 issue is used again on one of the later issues, and that the depiction of Dikar owes a lot to the way Tarzan was shown. Were the Tarzan stories also published in Argosy? Ray Nelson talks about fandom becoming preoccupied with the past, but I wonder if he's just reading the wrong fanzines. On the other hand, the popularity of historical fantasy and steampunk possibly show the trend is there, and goes beyond fandom to general readership and perhaps society at large. Someone else (not me) should visit this question in greater depth and more detail. I suspect in the end that with careful consideration anything we contend about popular culture and the zeitgeist can be supported with evidence if carefully selected.

///Yep, you are correct that technically speaking “The Martian” should not be considered for this year’s Hugo Award, altho there have been arguments that since it was originally released as a self-published effort with a fairly limited initial release vs a later publication by a respected publisher with decent distribution that those factors could have affected the decision had enuf nomination votes come in. However, I will note that my favorite for the award; “The Fifteen Lives of Harry August” by Claire North won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award this year, so those of us who reviewed and praised the novel to high heaven were not alone in our opinions. Arthur Leo Zagat on his own wrote primarily weird/horror/fantasy fiction, as well as detective material. He was never a writer of space opera, and his longest SF novels appeared in Argosy during the 1930s, which had rediscovered science fiction in a big way after the Depression hit. Many of ERBurroughs Tarzan novels appeared in Argosy, and of course, the very first story “Tarzan of the Apes” appeared in one of the other Munsey fiction pulps, All Story Magazine, back in 1912. To sort of paraphrase Mark Twain, not just statistics, but historical data about popular culture can be convoluted any way the writer wants it to be. In the dime novel hobby, and to some extent in the field of pulp magazine collecting, there are a lot of writers who claim to see strong feminist themes or evidence of racial justice and social progressiveness where in fact, precious little happens to be there at all. Still, this does not stop people from writing papers and delivering lectures at university symposiums claiming that early detective fiction, or a whole bunch of western stories, if examined closely enuf, will somehow render up the pre-conceived conclusions the writer is seeking to generate. I am not so sure steampunk SF is trying to focus on the past, so much as it is attempting to create that exotic, wide-open sense of wonder we first experienced with our initial exposure to the world of science fiction literature. Nothing is going to carry us back to the deserts of Mars, fighting for Barsoom and the love of Deja Thoris, or into the world of interstellar space cruisers battling against the sun smashers to save our planet from

24 destruction with Edmond Hamilton, or any of the other uniquely different, fantastically bizarre worlds of science fiction classics. But steampunk manages to generate its own strange new worlds by projecting unusual what-if situations and melding them together with a proto-Victorian past world that has already become sort of exotic to most people who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century. I believe it’s an effort to recreate the high adventure, colorful flavor of our own Science fiction past memories. Heaven knows there has been plenty of dark, gritty and depressing stuff produced in the genre over the past ten or so years, so some levity is surely called for.///

Brad W Foster - PO Box 165246, Irving, TX 75016 [email protected]

Great to get the new issue 45 of FADEAWAY in the mail box this past week (okay, maybe it was two weeks ago... been kind of hectic around here the past month!). Was a teeny bit disappointed, in my anal-retentive way, to not have the latest Forgotten Comics, "Common Sense Woman", in this issue. After having one of the series in almost every issue, gives me a slight eye-tic to break the run. Of course, there is no reason you have to run one in every issue, you should do exactly what you feel makes for the best issue every time. So, the problem is mine, not yours. However, it does mean, since I have little time now to do a new entry (see comments at beginning of paragraph about "kind of hectic around here the past month"), I'll hope she will find a home in issue 46, and will, at that time, work on adding a new addition to the series. As far as your being "late" with this issue, your reaction to that is kind of like mine about not having a contribution in the series this issue. We both feel the pain ourselves, but no one else probably really thinks it matters. Indeed, as far as this issue being "late", I personally am just pleased when anyone finds the time and money to put together and send out a new print zine these days. If actual life gets in the way of you doing a new one quickly, then doing a new one later is just as good, as far as I am concerned. If you can get back to your self-imposed bimonthly schedule again, that would be cool. But I will not complain of any "delays" between issues, if you are still putting them out. (And, hell, if I should complain if/when you decide to stop doing issues at all, I give you permission to smack me upside the head and tell me to stop complaining.) (By the by, quick version of our own adventures: our old van got caught in some of the flooding in Oklahoma City last month while there working a street art festival. We were informed that the engine was not only a total loss, but considering the quality of the rest of the 244,000 mile vehicle, wasn't worth replacing it. So lots of "fun" trying to work the show, figure out what to do with the dead van, rent a variety of vehicles to get our equipment back to Dallas, then shopping around for what we could afford to replace it. Oh, also had the studio flood a bit only a few days after getting back, when DFW area got hit with more rain in a six hour period than it had ever seen before. I really, really, really am tired of water screwing around with me.) Okay, I was only about two-three sentences into your review comments of "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" and I was already adding it to my list of "books to look for". And, having enjoyed The Martian tremendously, since you liked that as well, will trust your take on the first book. By the way, regarding "The Martian" not being on the Hugo ballot: many of us wanted to nominate it, but because of it's publishing history, coming out in a previous edition a little further back, it was not technically qualified to be listed. (On the other hand, huge sales, amazing reviews, and now a movie deal probably have the author not too unhappy about that....) Speaking of books, when got to your line on page 8: "..unless we got a Weather Wizard to undo the harm..." made me think: Have you ever read any of the "Weather Warden" series of books by Rachel Caine (ie, Roxanne Longstreet)? Fun kick-ass action series, with a group devoted to working to control the worst aspects of weather around the world, and all sorts of evil beings and such tossed in. Good old fashioned fun, I read them all and had a blast. Tryout the first one, "Ill Wind", and see if it grabs you, too. Yeah, I remember those cool Wally Wood "Total War" comics. I kept reading when he left and they became "Mars Patrol". It was like the perfect fighting comic, just come up with a nameless, faceless enemy that the "good guys" can slaughter without any real issues about if they are doing the right thing or not. Appealed to the little kid looking for simple answers, I guess. Speaking of Gold Key comics, I had never really thought about how Space Family Robinson predated the tv show, in my memory they were both there at the same time. When you brought it up in your response to George, I looked up some more info. And found out a fascinating story of how one publisher dealt with a tv producer basically stealing their material. This from wiki: "The first issue published in December 1962. With issue #15 (January, 1966), the "Lost in Space" title was added to the cover. The book "Silver Age: The Second Generation of Comic Artists" by Daniel Herman explains that when the Lost in Space TV series came out in 1965, it was obvious that it was inspired, at least in part, by the comic book, but CBS, the network airing the show, had never acquired the license from Western Publishing. Rather than sue CBS or Irwin Allen, Western decided to reach a settlement that allowed them to use "Lost in Space" for the title of the comic book. Since CBS and Irwin Allen licensed shows to Western, Western didn't want to antagonize them. Also the TV show title probably helped sales of the comic book."

25 Okay, I'm outta here. Lots of stuff to work on and deadlines looming. Please, no more water-related adventures for the rest of the year?

///Thanks for sending the illo along. I have no idea why it didn’t show up here in late December when it was originally emailed, but it has arrived now, and running in this issue, which is the important thing. I was in college ready to get out when MARS Patrol/Total War appeared. I read the issues and keep up with it after Wally Wood bailed out, mainly because I was buying a ton of comics of all kinds back then. I thot the initial set-up was good, but it was clearly a shoot-‘em-up war comic. The background wasn’t developed beyond the first few issues, and it was one of those sanitized war comics where there are plenty of explosions, and lots of gun muzzle blast flashes, but hardly any people got killed. Since the Viet Nam War was in full force at the same time, comparisons were inevitable. Clearly the market was readers younger than myself. I have since tried to go back to the series, but the glitches have not improved with age. Thus has become one of those comic series I am pruning from my collection. I will never reread it, beyond what I did earlier this year, and it doesn’t hold my interest anymore. Space Family Robinson on the other hand continues to provide lots of worthwhile re-reading enjoyment. Gold Key had a tight arrangement with Irwin Allen and probably coming to some kind of agreement about his pirating the comic book to turn into the “Lost In Space” TV show wasn’t hard to arrange. 244,000 miles on a van!! That’s way more than I ever got out of any of my old cargo vans. By the time I was pushing 120-130K miles the repairs were piling up and I knew it was time to move on to something newer. The problem of course, is after pouring buckos into repairs there is a natural reluctance to trade the beast in after spending all that money. Then, the next thing goes wrong, even more money has to be poured into the head and on and on. I think the US Government probably has the best policy (or at least they used to back in the day). They did repairs on their vehicles right up to the point where the next repair would exceed the original purchase price of the vehicle, and then it was scrapped that minute. I never went that far. I probably should have traded all my vans in well before I finally got around to finally doing it. I am stunned and amazed you were able to 244 thousand miles out of your vehicle. Remarkable indeed. I’m not familiar with the work of Rachael Caine. I’ll look around for a copy of “Ill Wind” and give it a try.///

Lloyd Penney; 1706-24 Eva Rd.; Etobicoke, ON; CANADA M9C 2B2

Thanks very much for issue 45 of Fadeaway. I honesty thought I’d fallen off the mailing list here. Glad to see I’m wrong. Comments guaranteed to follow. Don’t worry about missing your schedule. Fanzines are at the point where no matter when they arrive we’re happy to see them, and I certainly won’t complain about how timely they are or aren’t. Life certainly gets in the way of this fun hobby, and it looks like you’ve had more than your share of life’s interference. The Puppies groups have made quite a mess with the Hugos, and they look more and more ridiculous each day. There is now attribution to them, saying they are making demands and threats that the editors they don’t like at Tor must apologize or resign, or the Puppies will somehow boycott Tor. Guess they’re going to hold their breaths until they turn blue, and then, we’ll be sorry. I never thought I’d be saying this, but I am glad that the Hugos and Worldcons are part of my past. Worldcons were always great fun, but now, toxic politics have invaded them, and I want no part of it. I hope it survives this insanity. Looks like there’s a good chance Worldcon will return to Europe. I must agree with Sofia Samatar on the Lovecraft effigy…announce your awards and take some joy from them. I’ve won my share over the years, and Tvnne and I are up for another Aurora Award this year. Such awards are mere chunks of metal and wood and plastic, but they symbolize the fact that a majority of eligible voters thought you were the best in your field that year. Take them and run with them, and take some pride in accomplishments. Ah, there I am at the end. I knew I had something from Gerald Kersh. Unfortunately it’s just a single book: “Men Without Bones”. I turned 56 on June 3, and Yvonne and I had out 32nd wedding anniversary on may 28, so all the spring celebrations are done, and out waistlines and wallets are thankful for that. We have plans to vend at two conventions near the end of July, in Hamilton and Mississauga respectively. Thanks you for continuing to send me paper fanzines in this e-era. I look forward to seeing more issues, as your health and time allows.

///As I mentioned in my editorial, the problem with the delay of the last issue was only partly due to health and pain issues. It was mostly because I didn’t receive any of the articles people had been promising me for months and months. As I wrote, I never envisioned Fadeaway becoming a perzine, with me doing all the writing except for the letter column, and I hope it doesn’t turn out that way. People would get pretty bored reading my

26 ramblings, but I still have a few subjects I would like to write about and reviews I would like present, so we’ll see what the future holds. Well; if you’ve only got one book by Kersh, “Men Without Bones” is certainly a good one to have. It is apparently easier than anybody ever believed to skew and stuff the ballot box on the Hugo Awards, but when people began to believe they can impose their viewpoint on successful publishing firms just because they don’t toe some kind of arbitrary political agenda then I think they have demonstrated that they are whacko. Publishers producing many different books, books that routinely sell thousands of copies each, are not generally going to be affected by the rants of a few dozen, or even a few hundred loonies with an axe to grind. These kinds of ‘threats’ just show how out of touch with reality those particular individuals happen to be.///

Chris Sitko; PO Box 599; Hawthrone, NJ 07506

Thanks for sending me issues #44 & #45 of Fadeaway. They were great. Not sure what to include in an LOC, but I wanted to say that you put together an excellent zine. I like how you (as far as I’ve seen this far) focus primarily on classic sf & fantasy, without neglecting the contemporary field. I loved your pieces on Bomba and the Tomorrow series, neither of which will I (likely) read. It’s amazing how you expose the value in seemingly disposable fiction. The pieces on pulp fiction are my favorite. I was born in 1994 and grew up in a world where sf & fantasy are not only accepted, but often considered canon literature. (While I’m on the topic, what do you think spurred the change?) In fact, in both high school and college, I took SF&F classes, which are among my most cherished moments and reading experiences. At William Paterson University they also had a “Philosophy of Science Fiction” class. As both a reader and a writer of fantastic fiction, I often have great difficulty figuring out why anyone would want to write anything else. As my high school sf teacher once told me: “with science fiction, you’re not constrained. You can do anything. Engineer a new species, or build an entire world. You can reach out into space. I pity some genre writers. Romance writers, for example. Every book’s the same: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins her back, etc.” Despite how that quote sounds, neither he or I are judgmental. At least we try not to be. I still contact that teacher from time to time, sending him the final drafts of my fiction,. He still proudly owns copies of my former zine, as well as my juvenilia, which I now find embarrassing. If not for his encouragement I probably would’ve given up writing. Anyway, thanks again for sending me your zine. Keep up the great work, preserving this aspect of fan culture.

///I don’t know when the cultural shift took place that made science fiction more or less legit with the majority of the population. My suspicion is that the “Star Trek” TV series might have been the watershed moment, altho I remember people sniffing in distain (literally) when I bought SF mags and books well into the 1970s. Certainly the Trek TV show pulled a lot of people into the hobby, and a bunch of them stuck around in fandom, which was not normally the case with people attracted to a media related science fiction event. I think a lot of research would have to be done, tracing the development of SF/fantasy/horror in the electronic and visual media to determine when, or even if there was a real see-saw moment when the stuff became acceptable fare for most people.///

Jefferson P. Swycaffer; PO Box 15373; S an Diego, CA 92175 abontides@cox,net

Thank you again for Fadeaway #45. I like D. Bruce Berry’s front cover, depicting an elderly and somewhat scrawny warrior with shield and stone axe. He has a pensive look, sort of a “Father Time” expression, but you can tell it’s a bad idea to get pushy! Guys with stone axes are not the guys you want to enter into lengthy and strenuous debate with! I would have liked more detail on the Hugo Awards controversy. I’ve only heard the barest outline of what’s going on, and it would have made a lovely main essay in the Fadeaway style of detailed coverage. Ditto for Arthur Hlavaty’s quick coverage of the H.P. Lovecraft controversy. I think it’s sad that there is such a controversy at all. If we scorned all the writers who, especially in centuries past, held opinion that don’t work today, we’d lose a lot of the greatest of the greats. I’m thinking G.K. Chesterton, whose anti-Semitism is noisome today. (Actually, he doesn’t have a very good excuse, as there were plenty of writers, even in his time - and earlier! – who were able to avoid that particularly foolish ideological trap.) So, okay, yeah, Lovecraft was icky in some ways…but those were icky times. And speaking of politically incorrect, and yet still worthy of study, your own history of “Tomorrow” and the fiction depiction of a Japanese military occupation of the U.S. was wonderful stuff. It highlights much that was (and still is) wrong with our nation’s moral spirit…but also some that is good. I have long believed that nations have “national nightmares” which they compensate for with “national fantasies”. The U.S. nation nightmare is the sneak attack…which is why Pearl harbor was so hugely motivating. The 1984 movie “Red Dawn” played on exactly the same national fear as “Tomorrow” did.

27 (I think the Japanese national nightmare is “nature goes wild”, leading to Monster movies, tsunami panics, and so on. And the British national nightmare seems to be creeping socialistic bureaucracy, as treated by authors from George Orwell to Douglas Adams). I bit the bullet and put two of my books up on Amazon as Kindle books. “At the Sign Of the Breass Breast) and “The Capitulation of Carnivores”. The latter was an interesting experience: I went to DeviantArt and found an artist I liked, to commission the cover art from him. I’d never done that before. Neither had he! I’m impressed at how easy Amazon made the whole process. The U.S. Government can’t make a user-friendly health-care exchange web-site, but Amazon has mastered the art-form! Re Invisibility; my own humorous fantasy stories have involved a nice breaking-and-entering specialist who has volitional invisibility, and also levitation. Amazing how often second-floor windows are left unlocked… But as I’m writing in a vaguely Fritz Leiber-esque tone, I tend to focus more on how things work than how things don’t work. Oscar Wilde, in “The Importance of Being Earnest_, tells us, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” I sometimes think that when things work the way they’re supposed to, that’s fantasy, and when things break, malfunction, turn against you, or otherwise go sproing, that’s science fiction. (HAL, from “2001: A Space Odyssey), was one of my favorite characters in fiction. Ditto for Mike from “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. So, when it came time for me to write my own “sapient computer” novel, I made sure that she [she?] did not turn upon her creators in a stereotypical and clichéd “Curse of Frankenstein” mode. But again, is that just fantasy?) And a big boo and hiss to both Marvel and DC for their complete disordering of their respective superhero universes! They both ruined they whole set-up, and I hate ‘em both for it. The “Convergence” and “Warworld” motifs suck sawdust thru a siphon. They’ve thrown away decades of continuity, and gained nothing from the exercise. (Okay, actually, I have some vague hope that DC is going to use it as an excuse to bring back a handful of much- loved characters, who they never should have killed off in the first place, most specifically Big Barda and Sue Dibny. Whatever possessed those idiots to permit the death of Sue Dibny, I can’t even begin to guess. One of the most happily- married couples in all comics history, and they pissed that away. And ditto for Big Barda—she and Scott Free made a wonderful couple, and gave vicarious comfort and joy to many, many readers). (What is it with comics editors, anyway? Peter Parker couldn’t stay married to Mary Jane, and Hawkeye and Mockingbird, who seemed so very happy together, had to be rippled apart by a stupid and contrived plot line that was insulting to the characters…and to the readers@) But…I begin to rant! Fun cartoons! I always love Robert Cepeda’s outrageous sense of humor, and Steve S tiles and Jeff Stashler also

28 give us some wry grins. (As many of us have, I have been the “Dog Poop Fairy”. It’s a nasty job, but it’s gotta be done).

///I can distribute the fanzine as a pdf attached file, or as an attached word.doc file, however I have never seriously considered the idea because of the absolutely horrible response rate I get when I post the zine on the e-fanzines site. Namely, almost nobody responds who has read it on the site, and of those few who do the majority are the “gosh, loved the latest issue, keep up the good work” quickies. However, if you want a copy in either format as opposed to print, by all means, let me know. Postage went up yet again earlier this year, and I will probably prune back some more deadwood from the mailing list next issue to save a few bucks, so one less printed copy + mailing envelope + postage adds up in the long run. It may be that basic economics will kill the print fanzine finally after all else has failed to stifle the fannish creative forces. The latest Hugo Awards controversy (one of a never ending series of disasters and crisis points---collect the whole set, most fans are) is explained in several different fanzines. Go to the above mentioned eFanzine.com site and check out Guy Lillian’s Sparticus issue for a basic overview. Go and find File 770 on the web, which has devoted several issues to the morass in great detail. There are other postings. Frankly, I am tired of talking about all the never ending problems with this award. I think it is sad that there is a controversy regarding the Lovecraft awards, but then, I also think it was a mistake to use a statue of Lovecraft as the award in the first place. I believe part of the reason the editors at Argosy printed the “Tomorrow” series was that they were genuinely worried that the people of the US were ignoring the very real threat of Japanese imperialism in the far east. They believed if we were not prepared the Japanese would polish off China, and southern Asia, and then turn their attention to the islands in the Pacific, and eventually to the US itself, at which point we would be like the ostrich who had his head stuck in the sand so long he can’t run away from the hungry predator that is ready and willing to kill him at close range. The racist stereotypes may grate on the nerves now, but you can be sure they didn’t bother anybody after the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure the Japanese national nightmare is losing their traditional Japanese cultural and racial identity in a modern world that is determined to mix every culture and every type of human being together into one big pot seasoned with liberal does of modern technology and engineering. The Japanese accept almost no immigration from anybody anywhere, and have government panels to vet any new product or technology that would like to introduce itself to the Japanese people. This could be a losing battle, sort of like the long, protracted, and eventually ridiculous efforts of the French to protect the “pure” French language from outside phrases and idioms, but it could be that the Japanese will succeed, even as their population base rapidly ages and slowly shrinks. People do strange things all the time. Interesting to learn that you have posted some e-books thru Amazon. How are sales? Of course, any sales are better than no sales, but still, a friend posted a non-fiction law related book there a few years back and has yet to make ten bucks off the deal. Of course, he allowed a month of free downloads (he got about 350 people taking him up on the free offer), which might have deeply cut into his potential market. Comic editors and writers have to find ways to make their characters interesting to the readers. Married comic characters generally (but not always) cut the dynamics out from under the basic adventure premise of the plot setup. Yeah, the 1960s Hawkman and Hawkgirl were married and got along just fine, but realistically marriage creates new personality dynamics and new obligations that do not usually fit with a super hero life style. The dynamics work better if the hero’s girl friend is a part of the stories, which was common for many heroes in the 1940s and into the 1950s. Having another family member, a sister or a ward works well too. But generally speaking, marriage is viewed as the end of a hero’s two-fisted crime fighting career. As I have said before, generally I have not been able to get into the modern DC and Marvel heroes. The stories are both too depressingly gritty and also too expensive, since the now accepted way of handling comics is to have interwoven crossovers so readers are forced to buy many different comics to follow the twice yearly universe shattering multi-part crises that the company execs favor. No thanks, there are plenty of other comics from other companies that don’t insult my intelligence or force me to buy filler crap I have no use for.///

Ray Palm; PO Box 2; Plattsburgh, NY 12901-0002

ThanX for Fadeaway #45. Good to see you back at zining. I liked the "perzine" part of the latest issue. I enjoyed the story about the Weather Wizard. Have you encountered that character again? And that Anti-Serialist? I know after personally viewing them the Captain America and Blackhawk serials reek of EVIL! As for the recent winter hell — well, we didn't get the snow like you did but we were nailed

29 with the freezing temps. Since I don't own a car I had to bundle up and walk around in -15 F conditions at night. That wasn't adding in the wind chill factor. Like you the harsh weather unmotivated me, not much zining/writing by me. So far this summer has been kinda rainy with the added bonus of the two escapees from Dannemora Prison who may be lurking about. I won't bore you with any details because you've probably heard them a brazillion times in the news. (The reference: Veep Dick Cheney tells President GW that two Brazilians were killed in Iraq. GW responds: "Oh My God! Uh, how many in a brazillion?) I hope they catch that pair before someone is hurt or killed. Of course all these sightings around the country and so far no one caught. I anticipate an unconfirmed report that they were spotted at the South Pole or even on Mars. I also enjoyed your article, "Tomorrow! The Saga Of A Conquered America." That's what I like about Fadeaway: it broadens my offbeat interests, revealing niches with the niche. So how long before superheroes peak? With all the movies and TV shows featuring them it seems burnt-out for mainstream viewers and some fans will hit in a while. Supergirl on CBS this fall? Remember in the dismal B&W days of TV that the channels (all three of them) were dominated by westerns? Now cops have replaced cowboys. I hate cop shows more than saddle-sore westerns. Superheroes are the flavor of the week and people get tired of the same flavor. I noticed that Jefferson P. Swycaffer responded to my comment in a previous LOC that DC wants its superhero films sans humor. From what I've seen of pix from the next FF movie that production is going for the darkness. This new Fantastic Four film sounds like a major rocket wreck. I hated the previous ones except for the Roger Corman cheapie that was never released in theatres. Sure, it was cheesy and poorly made but it was entertaining unlike the other FF movies. There was an online item that a Marvel comic had three people sitting around a restaurant table who resemble the actors in the new FF movie. We see them before the building blows up. (http://www.slashfilm.com/fantastic-four-movie- cast-killed-comics/). A vote of confidence from Marvel insiders?

///Well, having two desperate murderers wandering around in the neighborhood can definitely take the bounce out of your summer season. They have since been dealt with, one fatally. The thing I don’t get is why they stayed relatively close to the prison. If I were in their shoes I’d put as much distance away from that area as possible. Of course, they’ve also managed to stay free for a long time with every police officer in the state looking for them, so they must have done something right, at least until the tragic ending. I don’t know if the public will get tired of super-hero movies and TV shows. The problem with most super-hero comic based television programs I have seen is a woeful lack of basic effects to make the characters work. In addition there is a lot of soap opera injected to fill out the time slot instead of basic story plotting. There are exceptions, but generally TV does not seem to be the best niche to try and configurate comic book super heroes into. As for the public’s changing tastes; westerns went out of favor in the early 1970s because the public was tired of westerns period, including western magazines, paperbacks, comics, hardbacks and the rest of the genre. There are still hard core western fans out there, and if a good TV western came along it would probably win support, but the days when the magazine racks and book stores carried enormous sections devoted to westerns, and the TV schedule showed 35% prime time broadcasting devoted to westerns is definitely over. Cop shows and private detective shows on the other have never gone out of fashion. The whole concept has been popular for over a century and a half, and the public fascination with the stuff has not abated at all. Modern crime and cop shows have to be more innovative and challenging than in past days. I recently tried to watch some “Streets of San Francisco” shows on DVD and was pretty bored. Things have changed. Today the public demands more complex stories involving more plot threads plus some character involvement. In real life the police have no particular trouble solving most of the crimes that occur. The problem may be catching the perpetrator if he decides to leave the area, or getting witnesses to come down to the court house and actually deliver some testimony, but all those complicated who-done-it puzzles that fill books and TV shows are a genuine rarity, which is one of the reasons, I suppose, the public is fascinated with the stuff. If you are tired of crime and cop shows, watch something else; or better yet, read something else. I find I watch very little TV these days because of the large number of loud, obtrusive, jarring commercials. I watch some shows on DVD, where they are presented minus commercial interruptions. It’s amazing how much more interesting programs are without commercials. But even there I find I am not watching that much TV related stuff these days. I find plenty of other things to keep me amused besides the boob tube.///

Frank Mazzarella; 23 Cooledge St.; Leominster, MA 01453

Hi Bob, and thanks for #45, it was a great issue. Not only was I happy to read about the tomorrow series, but once again, some of it is available on e-book...which is becoming the go to format for old pulp stories. That Australian Gutenberg site is priceless. Evidently many of the books that still

30 copyrighted here have become public domain in Australia.....I was able to get some of the "Bomba" books for free via google books and I continue to load my Kindle paperwhite with goodies from days of yore...and at no charge. Unfortunately arthritis is eating away at me and has turned my left knee into a source of chronic pain. I cannot walk without great difficulty and sitting too long results in the dreaded moment of getting up, which takes longer and longer each time I do it. The only way to get some relief is to walk long distances where I can get some kind of momentum going. Short walks, like in the office or courtroom are nothing but torture time for me. Give me a thought on July 28, 2015 when I go in for a total knee replacement and the promise of a return to normalcy.....right now I look like a wounded animal bouncing back and forth down the street like a penguin. If I was a horse someone would have mercifully put me down . Thank God for books and movies and which will hopefully make my rehab some what pleasurable. I turn 62 on July 1, and I was but a young 34 year old when I first met you through the Fabulous Fiction Bookstore. Anyway I am getting plenty of good serial watching on youtube and I enjoy searching that service for videos of pulp collectors and comic book collectors who seem to enjoy spreading the word via video. There are some great nooks on youtube for popular culture geeks like ourselves. Your scholarly articles are incredible but I also enjoy the letters of comment. There are some real thoughtful people who read Fadeaway who know a lot about just about anything and everything. Franzs Zeilich wrote a very interesting comment about Bomba's garments, thorn proof and with plenty of pockets. I still wish someone would publish a collection of your articles ranging from comic books and juvenile series to old radio shows and tv shows. What a great collection that would be! My wife and I are cleaning up my bookroom for use as a post operative bedroom and she is freaking out at the amount of books and mags that I have accumulated. All sorts of interesting conversations going on about hording and OCD.

///The Aussie Guttenberg site has a lot of unusual stuff not found elsewhere. I’m not entirely sure all of it is actually copyright free or if they are just posting it until somebody with a copyright claim steps in, but there is a lot of older stuff (as in MUCH older material) there that isn’t on any other book site. My sympathies on your bad right knee, but believe me, the operation you have upcoming is going to be the best thing you ever did to take care of the problem. I have had both my knees replaced, one in 2006 and the other in 2010, and while nobody is going to tell you that this is a fun operation, at the same time the technology has been improving steadily. I noticed a huge difference in the recovery time just in the four and a half year gap between my own operations. The use of the knee flex machine is a real benefit, as you will learn. The best part is that after X days of having to struggle with healing and exercises, one morning you are going to wake up, and all the pain, stiffness and discomfort will be completely gone, and that’s the moment you’ll know it was all worth it. Collecting books/mags/music/viedo/comics etc etc only becomes hoarding if you have never read/viewed/listened to the stuff or never intend to do so. If you are enjoying the material it may be a disorganized accumulation, but it is still a collection, and messy or not, it’s your mess, to do with as you like. People not involved in this kind of stuff tend to be very judgmental, altho these are often the same people who have a zillion pieces of sports equipment scattered everywhere, or half a room or sports memorabilia around, or nine crammed baskets of cloth and cloth remnants along with eight hundred dress patterns they haven’t gotten around to sewing yet, or six drawers full of clipped recipes they haven’t tried out yet (and probably never will). People surround themselves with what they enjoy, and it is not fair or reasonable for other people to make value judgments based on their completely different parameters.///

George Phillies; 48 Hancock Hill Dr.; Worcester, MA 01609

As always, good to hear from you. My sympathies on your medical issues. I had wondered where my issue of Fadeaway was As it happens, today is July 1, so today is more or less the first day of my retirement. My regular contract expired on June 30. I still have two student grades to assign, but I already know what they are. I just have to satisfy the rules as to when I can physically submit the grades. I now have much more time to write and am much enjoying it. The current topic is my next novel, italics, which it appears likely completed about the time the Supergirl fad peaks, namely some years from now. Mindful that we are almost totally buried in media of all sorts, I am referring to the new Supergirl television show, which has a large budget, the people who bring you Flash and The Arrow, a pretty actress, good special effects, and an opportunity to appeal to an audience of young women who are not completely taken by, as one person put it, “testosterone wearing a Cape”. Your comment on weather is very interesting but reflects a feature of New England that I first noticed in fall of 1965. We have high and low pressure centers that roll through New England on a regular calendar basis. It happens that much of the time there is an weekly cycle that is extremely good at keeping to seven days per cycle. This year and last year,

31 the snow was rather unpleasantly consistent about falling the same day of the week every time. In the last month, we seem to have regular rain about Saturday or Sunday. Your annoying crackpot gets no credit for the weather. He should explain why teenagers have not become better since serials went away. With respect to the Hugo award, I believe that all of Hugo fandom has indubitably earned a special Hugo award for reviving that most noble of events, the all-hobby fan feud. How can there be any doubt that it is been years and years since this sort of kerfuffle has invaded all sorts of locations? For good reading on it, I call your attention to Mike Glyer’s File 770, Eric Flint’s web page, and Mr. Correia’s webpage. No matter your opinion on the topic, there is someone who radically disagrees with you. Of particular positive note are the remarks of Eric Flint that the Hugo awards are locked in the style of writing that went out of style 40 years ago. Short fiction other than anthologies is no longer very important in science fiction. Novels have become much longer. Indeed, there is a proposal to add a new Hugo category, the Saga, vaguely described as being a third of a million or more words long. To balance this, the number of short fiction categories might be reduced to one or two for under 40,000 and 50,000 words. As I said, no matter your opinion, someone thinks this proves you have the IQ of the rocks in my garden. Or less. Thank you for your description of “The First 15 Lives of Harry August” and “The Martian”. I have extremely little time to read science fiction, or anything else. The face of the Lovecraft award, more or less, has a larger scale duplicate in public objection to the display of the Confederate flag. I was vaguely aware of Argosy magazine, but I had not realized that they published science fiction. Did they publish much of it, or was the Zagat story series a rare exception? I am fairly sure that MITSFS never identified Argosy magazine as something we should be collecting.

///I don’t know that the upcoming Supergirl TV program will be good. Having lots of money to play with is no guarantee of success, as a quick glance at assorted government, military, or even college programs will clearly demonstrate. The problems of translating a comic book, particularly a super hero comic book, to television are immense, not the least of which is the fact that most people who watch television do not read comic books, and would probably have no great interest in a show devoted to the kinds of stories that super hero comics regularly deliver. This means that, at the least, story compromises are going to have to be made to make the concept workable. I hope for the best, but most television shows based on comics have not worked, and have not survived very long either. The latest Hugo controversy has indeed revived the fandom-wide feud, but it has also demonstrated that some people are lunk headed jerks. Argosy Magazine ran quite a lot of science fiction and some fantasy thru the years it was in existence. You may recall that Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels were established to reprint the SF that had been published in past decades in Argosy and the other Munsey pulps such as All Story. Argosy was a weekly magazine thru most of the years of its existence, which meant it used up a lot of fiction. In my personal opinion Argosy was the greatest fiction magazine ever published. Vast numbers of the serials it ran turned up in hardback and a significant number of those stories were also adapted to movies. I have an extensive collection of the mag, including a lot of its previous incarnation as a juvenile story paper when it was titled The Golden Argosy. I don’t have all the issues, and at this point in life I am probably not going to complete the collection, but I have (and am) certainly enjoying the many years of the title that I do have.///

Gavin Gallaghan; 3634 ASven Springs Blvd.; New Port Richey, F L 34655

Glad to meet somebody else who is, like me, interested in old movie serials. I own several on VHS and DVD, from old silents like “Les Vampires” to talkie serials from Republic, Columbia and others. I don’t know if your diminutive opponent during your Great Serial Movie Debate was responsible for the snowstorms which repeatedly disrupted the northeast; but I do find it very curious, however, that Fate should have acted to bring someone so vociferous on the topic of serials, with someone like you, who just happens to be so interested in them. God’s little ironies, I guess. You can’t make this stuff up. FBI-profiler Robert Ressler originally derived the phrase “serial killer” from the old movie serials (altho the phrase “serial killer” was first used in psychologist Robert Eisler’s study of sadism, “Man Into Wolf,” in 1949). Ressler likened the thrill which the serial killer repeatedly experienced during the act of murder, to the excitement created by serial-movie cliffhangers: a big jolt followed by a letdown, followed by repeated attempts to recapture the same excitement in later acts of killing. So perhaps your little antagonist was onto something. Or more likely, on something.

32 So you sell items on eBay? I used to too. Until I ran into a buyer named “Drugula666”, who caused me all sorts of problems. Said I sent him/her the wrong item (I didn’t), demanded a refund, made all sorts of complaints; about what you’d expect from someone whose user-name derives from both drugs and the antichrist. Haven’t sold anything on Ebay since then. Too much trouble. Those Zagat books from Altus Press sound interesting. I’m hoping to get two other paperbacks from Altus: the werewolf novels of H. Warner Munn, and the complete Dr. Satan from Weird Tales. Unfortunately, money is tight (which is also why I haven’t gotten any more Joan Davis films). But—maybe I’ll search for clips of her films on YouTube. Incidentally, I think the funny female co-star in Boswell’s great Reid Fleming: World’s Toughest Milkman comic book series was based on Joan D). I am very interested in early pulp novels and publications such as Argosy; am also very interested in turn-of-the-century (and later) invasion narratives. So your article on this joint topic was a treat. A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the topic of H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in the Munsey mags for an anthology published by Scarecrow Press (still haven’t been paid for it). Someone else in the same volume wrote an article about HPL’s interest in the early 20th century invasion narratives. The book was entitled “Lovecraft and Influence”, but is on the whole rather uneven. F or my next HPL book I was going to have a long chapter on HPL’s vast ebt to the early Munsey authors such as George Allen England, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Garrett P. Serviss, and Francis Stevens, among others. I once got into a minor debate with weird fiction editor Darrell Schweitzer on Facebook, in which he insisted that HPL had never read Stevens’ early work in the Munsey mags, arguing that he wasn’t still reading those mags at that late date. I took the opposite position. A letter has since come to light, written in the 1920s, in which HPL affirms that, indeed, he was still reading the Munsey mags at that late date.

///I used to sell a lot of stuff on ebay, but these days I only sell a few things. Or try to sell them anyway. Ebay stopped being a vigorous platform for reaching interested collectors a few years back. There are plenty of jerks out there ready to dump on and try to cheat someone selling stuff, and there are tons of other people dumping their material, poorly described and in indifferent condition for almost nothing. Plus, the buyers seem to be satiated with material these days and not inclined to buy the kind of things I have to sell, which are books (primarily science fiction/fantasy), fantasy related games, and comics. There are other venues that offer a better sell-thru rate with much lower expense ratios that ebay, altho there are some things that seem only to sell thru ebay, so I still use it, taking advantage of their free monthly listings offer. Altus Press offers a wide variety of interesting pulp reprints, including some stuff that is, in my opinion, better off forgotten. Their trade paperbacks are priced at about the going rate, but almost all the titles they offer are also available as e-books, usually at a price of $4.99 each, which is quite affordable. At that price it is worth checking out some things I have barely heard of, and even if the book isn’t so hot, I’ve only wasted five bucks instead of twenty-five. Altus Press currently seems to be in slow down or stalled mode. I haven’t noticed much new coming out this spring, but perhaps that’s just my personal impression.///

Murray Moore; 1065 Henley Rd.; Mississiauga, ONT CANADA L4Y 1C8

Gee, Bob, you didn't like at least the end of my LoC on F 44: "Plotluck-plagiarism: I like it, Bob. "Bantu, the Zebra Boy" makes me see a boy with a body striped like a zebra; probably not the intended effect. Thanks for researching, writing, and sharing this Bombastic article." You suggest that many Worldcon attendees view Worldcon primarily as a social event to meet and interact with friends old and new. If Worldcon is just a party, Worldcon is an expensive party; five days, expensive hotel, different city/sometimes country, each year. I suggest for my part that Worldcon is not similarly focused as the annual meeting of the former Politburo. But surely Worldcon attendees have a strong interest in SF just as attendees of your Super Bowl have a strong interest in football. Looking at the Hugo nominee list for fiction and the Locus list, for me, the Locus list is the better list for the best SF fiction of last year. The number of votes is not as important as the ability of said voters to distinguish quality. “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” is a novel of which I was unaware before reading your mention of it. “The Martian” is a novel of which I am aware from multiple mentions and references. My current reading includes nominated novel “The Three Body Problem”. Maybe “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” will turn up on the list of Hugo nominated novels, pushed down by the Puppy nominee. It is on the long list of the Campbell Award nominees, along with “The Martian”. Wasn't “The Martian” previously published in some form such that it was ineligible as a 2015 Hugo nominee? This just in: “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” wins the Campbell Award! Did you suggest to your serial-watching buddies that you should rename your group the Conclave of Evil? Before I read your article describing Arthur Leo Zagat's Tomorrow series, Arthur Leo Zagat to me was the name of one of those before-my-time pulp mag writers with a distinctive name.

33 Milt Stevens remains ruffled that a long-ago visiting fan would ask if he could have Milt's duplicate books. I would cut that fan slack because he was Australian. Likely many of the books he saw on Milt's bookshelves never were available in his country.

///Worldcon may be an expensive party, but so are class reunions, or out of state family gatherings, or, for that matter, an evening out to see a well known personality or a name brand band. People are willing to pay to attend Worldcon, and the social gathering part of it seems to be of paramount importance to a large number of people who attend. Many regional conventions are also pretty expensive, and while I would hope the people who attend SF conventions had are least some kind of interest in the literature, increasingly, I see that a lot of them do not. Note the large number of people who attend Worldcon vs the much smaller number of people who bother to vote for the Hugo Awards. I might also argue that the hard core SF fans are often the ones who cannot attend the actual event, but buy supporting memberships anyway, just so they can cast their vote for the Hugos. I would be very interested in seeing a breakdown of voting percentages for supporting memberships vs actual convention attendees. I am pretty sure almost all the supporting memberships took the time to vote, but that a considerably smaller number of those actually coming to the event never even considered it. I can understand Milt Stevens’ ire that somebody would ask him to give a visitor duplicate or unwanted parts of his SF collection. I think that the way the request was presented would have a lot to do with it. In addition, the location of the fan and his current age/economic status would certainly enter into it. A visitor who was young and needy who asked if there was anything I didn’t want that I could spare would certainly receive a lot more consideration than a guy who was middle aged and prosperous who was just too cheap to buy stuff for himself. That said, as I have mentioned before, my own personal collection is not for sale or trade or for loan or anything else any more. I have other books that I am happy to loan out to people, including stuff I would happily give to somebody if they needed something interesting to read, but my personal collection is not up for grabs, and I might be pretty upset is somebody cavalierly suggested it was up for grabs just because I had invited a fellow fan into my home.///

Darrell Schweitzer; 6644 Rutland St.; Philadelphia, PA 19149-2128

Thanks for the new Fadeaway. I appreciate the article on Arthur Leo Zagat, who was a far better than average pulp writer, whose work deserves a selective revival. I must admit the one thing that always bothered me about the way Dikar is always presented in the artwork is more elementary than why he is clean-shaven. It’s not very plausible that Tarzan is clean-shaven either, and, indeed, Dikar look very much like a late Argosy Tarzan. My question is how Dikar and his pals manage to go about in little more than loin cloths in the territory of what was once the United States, when, as American readers know, that isn’t very practical. Just try that in the Southwest and see how far you get. Or, in my own state of Pennsylvania, a “savage” would do well to put on his buckskins before venturing forth into the forest, because the common briars would otherwise carve him up nastily. And there is the whole other issue of bugs. And consider the climate. How many days of the year is it practical to about nearly naked? Anyway, if you have a collection of ‘30s Argosys you know that there was at least one Yellow/Peril invasion story or future war story every few months. The magazine was reflecting real fears; the public awareness that both the Japanese and Hitler on the rampage, another major war was only a matter of time. Of course that “Slaves of the Yellow Horde” cover was provocative. It was meant to be. But it also would have resonated with the people of the time. As for the matter of H.P. Lovecraft, I think Arthur Hlavaty is wrong when he says that most pulp writers just wrote ethnic stereotypes because they were expected to, as opposed to Lovecraft who believed them. No, these are the unexamined “everybody knows” assumptions of the time. Most people had never questioned them. Therefore what we call “racism” (not a work in use at the time) was rife. Yes, Lovecraft did believe those ideas. So did a lot of people. If you want to understand Lovecraft’s views on race, run a Google search on “Encyclopedia Britannica” + “1910” + “Negro” and in a couple of keystrokes you will find an appalling passage which was the highest scientific orthodoxy of the time, all about how blacks are lower on the evolutionary scale, their brains form differently, they may not be actual Home Sapiens but descendants of some earlier species, etc. etc. Lovecraft did not despise blacks. He even naively wrote (in an era when lynchings were commonplace) “surely no one means them any harm.” But he regarded it as a proven scientific “fact” that blacks were not fully human. His great intellectual failing, as Joshi points out, is that where he advanced his views in all other areas, in the light of new data, in this area he remained stuck in 1910. I think most people are asking the wrong question here. The right one is how such a beloved figure, a genius and a perfect gentleman, could be so pig-headedly wrong on this one point. That he was a beloved figure is clear enough from the memoirs of Peter Cannon’s “Lovecraft Remembered”. He was also smarter than most of us. We should be humbled.

34 If someone as great as Lovecraft could be so wrong about something so “obvious”, isn’t it likely that the future will regard us as wrong too, perhaps on something we haven’t even thought about? The example also teraches us to be a little more critical of scientific “facts”. Of course the first time the World Fantasy Award was given to someone who could have had a “problem” with it was the first year it was given, in 1975, when the Life Achievement went to Robert Bloch, who is Jewish. Lovecraft’s attitude toward Jews and their assimilation into American society is, at the very least, complex. But of course Bloch was one of Lovecraft’s protégés, and an old friend. One of the reasons his image was chosen for the Award in the beginning was precisely becayse of this sort of multi-generational influence. Sadly, Lovecraft would never have imagined that a black person could have written an award-quality work of fantastic fiction. There were no such writers in his day, and there had not been up to that time. He was probably unaware, as were most white Americans, that blacks had any literature at all, or any capacity for creating one. I think it would have done him a world of good to have met an educated, literary black person. I am not sure how he would have reacted. But one tries to imagine what might have happened if he’s made the acquaintance of his contemporary, Langston Hughes, during his New York period.

///The artists for the “Tomorrow” series took lots of liberties with the stories, including having The Bunch run around in abbreviated clothing. Zagat described the basic outfits in the original story, but after that I don’t think he mentioned clothing at all; it was the story plot and the flow of events that concerned him. But yeah, trying to run around in a loin cloth in New York state during the winter time is definitely not going to work. You are correct that by the late thirties Argosy ran a lot of Yellow Peril or dictatorship upheaval stories. In addition to fears of the Japanese I believe the editors and many of their writers were very concerned that Hitler’s success in Europe, and the popularity of the fascist political philosophy with a significant number of Americans could result in a fascist revolution that would rip the nation apart. There were some excellent short serials based on the theme, which I may get around to discussing sometime in the future. People these days tend to think that the nation was united in opposition to Nazism, but in fact the ‘master race’ theories and the themes of fascism had a lot of adherents in the US, especially during a period where the Depression waned but never seemed to entirely go away. Plus, quite a lot of people did not want to get involved in any kind of foreign war after the horrible events and loss of lives that followed US involvement in the Great War. There are still plenty of people who believe, even now, that the country should never have gotten involved in what became WWII. As I said in the article, my primary regret is that Zagat died so young, before he could really get back into writing of science fiction and fantasy again. I don’t think the question of the Lovecraft statue is going to go away soon. The fact that Lovecraft was a racist who also didn’t like a lot of other classes or people in the society of his time is less important than the fact that a statue of him is being used as the trophy for the World Fantasy award. Lovecraft may have been a product of his times when it came to social mores, and I really can’t fault a guy for being a bigot in a period when the overwhelming majority of his fellow citizens were also bigots. But times have changed. No one disputes the enormous influence Lovecraft has had on the field of supernatural fantasy and horror, but to use his image as the award certainly seems inappropriate.///

AND THEN DARRELL WROTE---

One of the best Zagat stories I can remember was reprinted in one of the Wonder Story Annuals, originally from Thrilling Winder in the late thirties. New York gets trapped under a force field dome. No happy ending. A gloomy and eloquent story, so unlike much other pulp fiction of the day. I know that some Americans did indeed support Fascism in those days. It was an extreme decade. Sprague de Camp used to comment that many people who knew said things then that they later regretted. But what I think those Argosy serials reflect is a fear of another world war, since by this time people kn ew most of what had been censored about the Somme, Verdun, etc. The Lovecraft bust was not perceived as a “mistake” until just a few years ago. It went on for decades without being questioned. Shall we also abolish the Edgar Allan Poe award for mysteries? It is, after all, a bust of a fascist who favored slavery. And what about the Woodrow Wilson Fellowships? I do not know what is going to happen to the World Fantasy Award, or if I did I could not tell you, since the World Fantasy Con moves in mysterious ways. I think it distinctly possible that if the award is changed, an H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Award will be instituted very quickly. Actually you CAN fault a guy for being a bigot in a society where most people were bigots, and in his bio of Lovecraft, Joshi does precisely that. Lovecraft was supposed to be an intellectual, and someone who kept up with the latest scientific developments, but in this area, he did not, even tho some of his friends, (notably Morton, a founding member of the NAACP) most definitely did, and argued with him at length. Basically, Lovecraft claimed to be more intellectually

35 advanced than the herd, and he wasn’t. The argument in favor of the award image is that this is only a small part of his overall thought and it does not figure in most of his writings. If only “On the Creation of Niggers” had not survived. At one point there was only one copy in existence, and some scholar held it in hand, knowing he was the only person in the world who knew about it. Scholarly integrity would require that it be preserved, of course, but had it not been, we might have avoided quite a lot of trouble.

///If the original award had been titled ‘The H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Award For Supernatural and Horror Fiction’, or something similar, there would never have been any discussion about using his likeness as the trophy. But his name is not part of the title designation, and this controversy will not go away anytime soon. I think HPL’s opinions on race, foreigners, fascism, social structure and the rest of it were pretty well known. The “Creation” booklet just adds more fuel to the flames.///

Rich Dengrove; 2651 Arlington Drive, #302; Alexandria, VA 22306

You get a long missive on Fadeaway #45, even though you didn’t publish my letter there. Tsk, tsk. On the other hand, I got the important thing, another issue of Fadeaway. This has been a long running zine, and I have sent letters of comments to it, to a lesser extent, long running. Furthermore, the Hugo has been long running. If what you say about the Hugos is right, however, then, long running or not, they are not long for this world. That might make the sad puppies even sadder. The idea was to take over fandom. However, they might end up taking over nothing. Anyway, if true entertainment doesn’t happen with the Hugos, it happens in our lives. A kook cursing your group for showing old time serials? Where does reality come up with such characters? At first, you presume he is someone letting off steam. Then, when snow cancels all your meetings for a number of Wednesdays, you begin to suspect magic. But how do you fight magic? That comes next in your life. An affable older gentleman, Bob Manners, claims to be a Weather Wizard; and tells you to boil some sand, which will rise and affect cloud condensation. In short, the procedure makes as much sense as lots of other methods of rain making. Thus, you are tempted to do this. However, you’re a modern man and Bob’s prescription sounds too much like hooey; so you remain reluctant. Instead, you toy with the idea of scheduling the Wednesday meeting to Tuesday and bypass the creep’s vendetta. That is what we call reality – or is it? Anyway, that is your story and you’re sticking to it. In all honesty, I’m more dubious about Arthur Hlavaty’s tale of Lovecraft, which is documented. Lovecraft, for most of his life, was what we today call a bigot. However, you have to take into account that a lot of people rated as such bigots in those days. They would never have thought not to be. I am sure Lovecraft reflected the class he was born into. Can we blame him for not having modern views? It would be nice if he did, but I couldn’t take him too much to task. Also, we have to give him credit for at least partially repenting when he married Sonia Greene, a woman of Jewish origin. However far Lovecraft traveled from his New England Republican roots, I doubt he went as far as Arthur Zugat in being less racist and sexist than the average for his time. Of course, Zugat’s Tomorrow series in the Argosy Weekly, nonetheless, appears racist and sexist to us with a seventy year + lead. That Blacks helped the White rebels fight the Oriental invaders is rendered meaningless to us by their black dialect. Also, I am certain the serial would reek of sexism even though he featured women fighting on the side of Whites. Not only is there a future perspective on the Orientals attacking and conquering America; there is a past perspective. In English speaking lands, my understanding is that the idea of future war originated in the 18th Century. However, it did not take off until the "Battle of Dorking," an 1871 novella by a George Tomkyns Chesney published in Blackwoods Magazine. There, England was defeated by an invasion of a German speaking enemy because it hadn’t kept itself prepared. That inaugurated a flood of Future War novels, which included H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Even P.G. Wodehouse contributed a parody to the genre, The Swoop! England is invaded by nine different armies, including the Swiss Navy. The English elite is more interested in a cricket tournament, and England ends up being saved by a boy scout named Clarence. While I am not too certain I would love the Future War novels, I remember loving the ‘50s kid show, Capt. Z-ro. George Phillies brought up the subject. Not only were production values low like he said; but, as an adult, I would find it repetitious. In fact, if I remember correctly, the plots had a formula. Something counter to written history was about to happen, and Captain Z-ro would have to correct it. However, while the adult me would have minded the repetition, the kid me wouldn’t. For the young me, the concept yielded a sensawonda. Certainly, my young self found sensawonda in fantastic devices like Capt. Z-ro’s time machine. Also, disagreeing with you in your reply to Ray Nelson, I found a sensawonda in the idea of the future. Of course, the future has always been a projection of the present; and such projections never work out. In the ‘50s, writers believed TV would advertise vodka and cigarettes far into the future. Sometimes, science fiction projects current machines of destruction and their use into the future, predicting war and the destruction of civilization. I can see why some might protest that that generates fear, not a sensawonda. However, I suspect it generates both at the same time.

36 One person fooled by projections was Adolf Hitler. He wished to start his war in the mid or late ‘40s, as you say, not 1939. Then, he projected the German population would support a population which could actually conquer the world. However, his projections went astray. Presently, likely opponents ceased being totally engrossed in their domestic affairs and started arming themselves. Around 1939, he was afraid the Allies were going to catch up militarily. Thus, he decided to start World War II early. More soldiers was Adolf Hitler’s plan for World Conquest; according to Jefferson Swycaffer, union pension funds looked like they would buy up the economy in the ‘80s. Of course, unions have been sinking from 1970 onward. I wonder if they can be restarted as a voluntary pension plan; and, during a time of depression, buy up businesses, whose stocks had dropped to nothing. ...Eh, probably a pipe dream. Unions owning companies did not work out in the ‘80s. Maybe, as you said to Milt Stevens, the Sheena TV series didn’t work out better. However, one time, I got a fixation on the star Irish McCalla. Strangely, I found out she realized she could not make it in Hollywood and returned to her first love, art. Apparently, she did well enough with Western art. In fact, it looked like she especially loved doing the somewhat kitsch paintings, plates, etc. of cowboys and American Indians, which paid the bills. Irish McCalla was a member of the art world. At any rate, the real art world. Was Jesus a member of the Essenes because he never married? I do not know who claims he was an Essene. The problem with his membership is while they were recluses, he was very active in the world. On the other hand, there is no evidence from the canonical and non- canonical Gospels that he married, except for a few lines written many centuries later. It is true he seemed close to Mary Magdalene, especially in the non-canonical Gospel of Mary. However, that does not mean he married her.

///Zagat’s writing in the “Tomorrow” series did not reflect any sexism, in fact, pretty much the opposite. All the girls in the story, wherever they came from, were independent free-thinkers who insisted on fighting along-side the men in the battles, and taking as many risks as the males did. The only possible exception to the overall rule of complete equality might be made when one of women in a small savage human groups Dikar encounters decides she wants to have a romantic encounter with Dikar to make her abusive mate jealous. Dikar ignores her, and basically can’t figure out what she is trying to do (stressing, once again, how incredibly naïve Dikar and the rest of The Bunch were). The woman falls into a sullen rage and resolves to kill him, and almost succeeds. The story makes it clear that this woman is a mental case with serious personality problems, and is hardly reflective of the other women who take part in the story plot. I’m not so sure Adolph Hitler wanted to start WWII in 1939. I suspect he believed that Britain and France and the other nations around the world feared the horror of another major war and would be happy to avoid it if possible. The European powers had appeased him in his previous demands, and nobody, certainly not Hitler, believed any country would actually go to war over Poland, a hybrid cobbled together nation that has been the door-mat of Europe, invaded and deconstructed for centuries. Hitler even offered what seemed to many to be advantageous peace and economic terms, but the tenure of the European governments had changed, and the line was drawn with Poland. When the Danzig incident occurred, the war was under way. I think Irish McCalla believed she was type-cast in the Sheena TV role, even tho she did other movies and TV appearances afterward. She was originally a star model and considered modeling to be her primary career. From the mid fifties thru the early 1960s there was a great surplus of actors, and a decline in the number of movies being made, also in the number of movie studios themselves. Ms McCalla married well, three times in a row, to successful husbands, so she didn’t have to depend on artwork to make a living, plus from the mid 1970s onward she was in constant demand by movie and nostalgia conventions where she often appeared in a Sheena costume, selling photos and autographs. I will pass on the write-up concerning Jesus. This is well beyond the range of what Fadeaway seeks to cover. Discussing a prophet who lived two thousand years ago, one who never bothered to write anything down himself, invariably leads to plenty of speculation and controversy. Hundreds of thousands of scholars both professional and amateur, including entire schools of archeology grubbing around the region for hundreds of years have yet to come to any kind of consensus about the life of Jesus, and I sure don’t want to become part of any of that discussion.///

David B. Williams; P. O. Box 58; Whitestown, IN 46075

Whew! What a relief. I was mildly disappointed on January 28 when Fadeaway 45 didn't appear in my postal box. I was even more disappointed on the 29th, and actively concerned on the 30th. For at least a dozen issues, Fadeaway had arrived on the 28th of the publication month, or the next day. As weeks became months, I passed through the depths of despair to reach fatalistic resignation. After 55 years in SF fandom, I have seen many fanzines expire. Then, Oh joy! That familiar large manila envelope in the box.

37 I can sympathize with your excessive snow experiences (or "Yankee cotton" as they call it down South). I work with an organization headquartered in Cambridge, and at their recent annual meeting the director showed photos of the HQ building with snow drifted so high that you could walk up to the roof. We got a couple of good blizzards here, but that was just the back edge of the storms that plunged down from the Arctic, turned east, and headed for Massachusetts. Your recent health issues seem to have impinged on Fadeaway 45. Bound between pages 4 and 5 of my copy, I find a letter from Jennifer Haynes, surgical coordinator for Joseph M. Williams MD, regarding your required physicals, plus a two-page past medical history form (not filled out). Do I have a collector's item here, or did every issue contain these inclusions? Thank you for breaking your vow about not commented further on the Hugo situation. I have to concur with all your views, with one correction. The last time I checked, a couple of years ago, the Best Novel category still received the highest total of votes, not the movie or TV categories you claimed. Actual readers are still voting for the Hugos. My pet peeve is with the Best Fanzine category. I don't understand how a blog can be a fanzine. But blogs have consistently won the Best Fanzine Hugo in recent years. In fact, SF Signal won the Best Fanzine Hugo, then withdrew from that category and won the Best Fancast Hugo the next year. But if blogs are fanzines, why don't any of the blogs post their latest issue on the eFanzines site? We seem to have reached a point in Postmodern Fandom where most of the "fans" don't know what a fanzine is. So now we have two Hugo categories in which blogs can win awards while traditional fanzines have no category, thanks to the many more voters who read blogs but not fanzines. The basic problem is with the "equivalent in other media" language added to the Best Fanzine rules. Maybe I'm just simpleminded, but to me, the equivalent of a paper fanzine in other media is not a blog but a digital fanzine published directly on the Internet or distributed to readers via e-mail. The short article on the Lovecraft award controversy puzzled me. I can see why writers who belong to ethnic minorities might dislike Lovecraft's racist and ethnic attitudes, but the award only recognizes him as a the iconic writer in the weird horror field (just as receiving the Lovecraft award only recognizes a writer's literary achievement, without reference to their social, political, or gender attitudes). Lovecraft was a man of his times. His expressed social attitudes reflected the world around him. See the several comments on racism in your article about Arthur Leo Zagat's Conquered America series. Almost everyone back then was racist, it was quite normal for the time. Regarding Conquered America, a good article with lots of information on a writer I had heard of but about whom I knew absolutely nothing. My problem with the Tomorrow! saga is military, not literary. America has what's called strategic depth (as both Napoleon and Hitler learned with regard to Russia). There is simply no way that Asian invaders could land men and equipment on the West Coast and fight there way across 3,000 miles to reach the East Coast. The logistics are impossible. The assailants would need to ship thousands of tanks, trucks, artillery, ammunition, etc. etc. all the way across the Pacific and then haul it 2,000 miles further just to reach the Mississippi. The D-Day invasion of Europe across the English Channel was barely achievable. Imagine if the Channel was 4,000 miles wide. You folks in Massachusetts can relax, the Yellow Peril will never reach you.

///So that’s where that stupid medical form went! I turned this place upside down looking for that sheet of paper. Ms Haynes faxed another copy to my doctor’s office, so I was able to get most of the required tests and scans done, which, as it turned out, weren’t really needed at all, and by the way, the cataract surgery didn’t even take place at that particular hospital either. Sometimes it seems that the medical establishment is as screwed up as my memories of the military bureaucracy are. Part of the never ending crapola of the Hugo Awards are that they will not follow their own rules, and they refuse to create new categories for the changing times. The requirements for the best fanzine Hugo require that it not be a blog or podcast, but the rule doesn’t get enforced. There should be a couple or three new categories to reflect the enormous impact the internet and the electronic world is having on fan activity, but no one is willing to add any new categories. I disagree with your assessment that the USA is so large that no nation could conquer it. The “Tomorrow” series neglected the initial military conquest details, focusing instead on what would happen twenty plus years after the final conquest as the new breed of Americans tried to regain their country. Most of the novels that deal with the conquest of the US automatically factor in the idea that there would be fellow-travelers and Quislings who would voluntarily join the conquering army and work with them to establish their “New Order”. In fact this is exactly what happened in Europe and much of Asia when the fascist armies swept thru. In addition, there is generally never a fight-to-the-last-man-standing mentality in most wars. Once the military forces are defeated, the civilian economy and government is usually on the verge of collapse as well, so conquerors have no great problem establishing controls and restrictions on civilians, including cities, transportation and production. Usually this works out well, but sometimes it does not. For example, when the Japanese invaded the Philippines, Manila immediately declared itself as “open city”, that would offer no resistance to the incoming Japanese army. Despite this the Japanese committed innumerable atrocities then they arrived in Manila, which,

38 along with their other actions in the country, immediately helped galvanize a substantial guerilla movement that keep a lot of Japanese troops pinned down trying to maintain control that would under normal conditions have gone to the fighting front to face the Americans and British forces opposing them. In Russia the Germans were initially greeted as saviors by a population that was thoroughly sick of Stalin’s brand of communist dictatorship. Had the Germans treated the civilians as people in an occupied territory instead of worthless racial scum inferior in every way to the Master Race, they would likely have been successful in their conquest. The Japanese treatment of Chinese civilians, including the notorious Rape of Nanking insured that the Japanese army would basically only control the ground they stood on during their entire invasion of China. Despite that there was a Chinese puppet government established under Japanese control that was able to keep some parts of occupied China relatively peaceful while the Japanese forces tried to continue their advances. But generally speaking conquerors only have to deal with opposing armies. If the opposing army can be crushed, the civilian government and the remaining population will accept the conquest with no great problems, and that is probably what would have happened in the US. People tend to forget today, but back in the late 1930s and early 1940s there were a lot of people who sympathized with the Nazi racial theories, and many others who felt that a fascist style of government with centralized control of industry, wages, and civilian welfare, was the only real answer to the woes of the Depression which was hanging on despite everything the President and Congress had done to get the economy moving again. In Europe the Nazis were able to get significant numbers of men from the areas they occupied to actually join the German military forces. I think any fascist invader of this country could count on plenty of local aid and encouragement. And finally, I will also note, that during WWII, and Korea, and Viet Nam, the US had no real problems moving trillions of tons of military supplies across the Pacific Ocean to reach the fields of combat. Vast distances and vast oceans may have been a problem in past centuries, but those problems became insignificant in the 20th century with modern technology at hand.///

AND THEN DAVID WROTE---

I agree with you about the need for new Hugo categories. I'm not even sure what a "fancast" is. However, I can now explain the problem you refer to in the statement: "The requirements for the best fanzine Hugo require that it not be a blog or podcast, but the rule doesn’t get enforced." The Hugo administrators think they are actually following the rules. In 2011, the Best Fanzine rule was amended to include only actual fanzines. But in 2012, an evil-doer got the rule changed again, to include "or the equivalent in other media" language. Since then, the Hugo administrators have believed that they are obligated by this language to allow blogs. They are wrong, of course. It's just a matter of critical interpretation. In my view, blogs are not fanzines in other media because blogs are not periodicals with dated or numbered issues and invariable formats. The equivalent of fanzines in other media are the digital fanzines issued as PDF files and distributed or posted via the Internet. If next year's administrator came to the same conclusion, we would again have a Best Fanzine category exclusively for fanzines. I have published two detailed diatribes on this topic: "The Fan Hugos: Threat or Menace?" in The Drink Tank 255 and "Some Whacky Ideas" in The Drink Tank 378. All the points you make against my "strategic depth" concerns are valid. However, the case remains that there is no recent example of an invader conquering a nation that possessed strategic depth. I think even Napoleon and Hitler realized that the conquest of Russia was not achievable in strictly military terms. They both assumed that there would be a political collapse and surrender after their initial victories and deep penetration (you make this point about the civilians giving up after military defeat). They were wrong. The Japanese enjoyed a similar experience in China. The US was able to sustain war in both Europe and the Pacific because of our vast industrial capacities. We could build ships faster than the Germans could sink them. Then the invasion succeeded because Germany lacked strategic depth. Hitler proved that he would never surrender, but he had no room to back up in either East or West.

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